Dear Selma and Roland, In all probability it is true that the students from Harvard and Yale failed the IIT entrance exam. This does not reflect on their intelligence but just on the extremely wide scope and high level of the IIT-JEE exam. My friends who got into IIT started studying for the entrance exam(separate from normal school studies) 5 years beforehand i.e. when they were in the eight grade. I have studied and answered that exam and I can tell you that it is extremely hard. The level of Physics Chemistry and Maths is more suited for graduates in those streams than for highschool students.
To get into Harvard and Yale they consider your SAT scores, extra-curricular activities, references, etc. There is no way most undergraduates from MIT or any other Ivy-League university would pass that exam for the simple reason that they have never studied 75% of the topics on the IIT-JEE exam. Similarly there is no way any Indian student would get into an IIT without studying exclusively for the entrance exam for at least 2-5 years or going for special coaching classes(which is the norm today). But the good news for IIT's and India ends there. The under graduates all leave for jobs or higher studies abroad. As a result to get into the post graduate courses in IIT is much easier and Phd programmes even easier. To get into postgraduate courses in top universities abroad meanwhile is tougher and to do your PhD even tougher. The result of all this is that the amount of research(industry sponsored) and paper publication in IIT's is much less than say MIT, Caltech, Imperial, etc. In fact it is in no way comparable. Just for your reference, The annual budget of IIT Powai is about $21.3 million a third of which comes from sponsored research. The annual budget of MIT is roughly $1 billion out of which $250 million comes conducting sponsored research. The innovation and cutting edge research carried out in MIT and other top universities abroad is years ahead of our IIT's. Lastly, please don't blame those poor parents who send their children back to India for early schooling. If you are looking purely at technical fields such as engineering and sciences there is no doubt that Asian high school students are way ahead of their Western counterparts. It is one of the reasons that in my course here in England there is not a single British(Caucasian) member, not even in the teaching staff !! The only Europeans in my course are Greeks (who are outstanding mathematicians I must admit!). The same is in other top technical colleges in London, I have been told(Cornel should be able to shed some light on this). No one here is interested in studying anything related to the sciences. It is not a matter of "garlanding" any one system with accolades, but you have to admit the one that works best is the one that produces what economies require. Here in England they are importing doctors. engineers, architects and scientists at a mad rate from abroad in spite of having the best schools in the world for theses fields here. While this is going on you hear young people here complaining on how difficult it is to find a good job. The same is the situation in the rest of Europe among youngsters. That really get you thinking! Society needs philosophers, artists, political scientists, etc but all this has to be balanced by what the economy needs. Maybe you could shed some light on the situation of young graduates in America and Canada. Regards Sunith Velho _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
