March 24, 2005

A Damning Revelation - Part 1: IITs blacklisted?

I was quite shocked when I read this newspiece on Rediff. com. It was regarding upgrading the status of some institutions in India to the status of IITs. Shocking I said, because a few of these institutions have in fact been blacklisted by many German and US universities. I am not entitled to talk of the US situation, but here in Germany, a few Indian institutions have in the past gained quite a dubious reputation of being the source of fake certificates and other scandals. Some colleges from the Hyderabad region have been the source of such fakies. Name what you want, you will get that certificate, be it a simple Software Skills certificate, or a German G-3 certificate, to the most advanced degree certificate or a GRE / TOEFL scoresheet. (It is worth noting here that even now some German Universities do not press for the official GRE/TOEFL scoresheet posted directly from the ETS).

Moreover, quite a few other universities in India have been marked for sidelining, as the standard in these universities has plummetted to unfathomable depths. Take for instance the scoring system in some institutions. When I came here in September 2001, having obtained a Bachelor's degree in Engineering from the University of Madras, it was not so difficult for a student to obtain 80% marks for his / her final average. The corresponding benchmark at some other universities, like the Bombay / Pune University, was a mere 60% where this used to be invariably always the score a university-topper. When the German Universities set a benchmark for admitting students, many deserving candidates from such universities used to lose out to other not-so-deserving ones from some other universities, just because the standard in these universities was so high that the selected candidate's credentials were no match to the one who lost out.

On realizing this, a few universities, notably the TU Darmstadt, started adopting a scaling procedure, wherein they had a list of GPA's from different Indian Universities, thus gaining insight into their standards, which they promptly adopted as one of their criteria for selection. More importantly, they have started recommending GATE scores as a criterion, among other things. Please check the link to know more in this regard.

Well, the crux of the issue is that many institutions recommended for upgradation to the status of IITs are simply not worth consideration, as they have already gained a bad reputation here abroad, in addition to defacing the value of India as a whole, as one of the parameters that any foreign education institution uses in estimating our country is the standard of our own educational institutions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do agree to some extent that there will be a dilution in value of an IIT degree if such mergers take place without doing any upgradations both in sylabi and selection process. This will obviously not happen after these institutions come under the IIT banner.

Institutions are afterall made up of students, professors and management.We should not forget that there are good quality students even in other institutions and as for the professors, there will hopefully be systems in place to ensure that they are on par with other IITs. With increasing number of students opting for engineering it will be good to have more IITs, so that more people can get the benefit of high standard education. Hence I would support more IITs being created if the admission criteria remains same and so are the syllabus.

Here it would be worth mentioning with pride and honour that IIT is planning to setup its first overseas campus in Singapore that too with the full financial support being provided by Singapore government. This is how IITs are being viewed outside India. For information go through this website : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/
html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=20392

Bhuvan said...

Hi Murali:

My argument was not against any insitution being converted to an IIT, in which case I agree with your argument absolutely. But what I am against is those particular institutions named in the Rediff.com article which were recommended for upgradation. While I agree that any institution worth its salt in academic value is fit for this, I certainly can not and will never agree when it comes to those particular institutions like Osmania University that have a dubious reputation, especially here in Germany as I have mentioned in my Blog. Cheers.