The Problem of IIT

I study at IIT. And being an IITian the default Indian assumption is that I get the best education India can possibly offer. Well yes, actually. I think the claim's quite correct, this is quite possibly India's best. But is it the best of India's potential? NO. Is it utilizing the best of students and professors? NO. Is the whole thing a big disappointment? A big yes.

Whats wrong?

Several things in fact. First and foremost is the fixation of the IIT system with mugging, means this is a system that rewards fighters a lot more than the genuine concept-oriented studs. Unfortunately, this tendency, aided and abetted by the semester style of learning, makes you forget what you learnt ultra quickly. So whats the use of cramming, or learning, or spending money if you truly don't learn anything. One of the most laughable excuses regarding this I had once heard from an IIT Kharagpur professor who told, "Well you see IIT students are all intelligent, it's not the learning that matters, what matters is these students can adapt to any corporation and can work in any field." IF, intelligence, not knowledge are what IIT students are famous for, then why create these institutions in the first place? Rather hold a PCM exam every year and declare the top 1000 or so students as winners. Track them 30 years later and beat your own drums.

Second is the over-emphasis on theoretical knowledge. By this I do not want to criticize theory in the slightest way, but to me it seems that the application component should be equally or even more important to an engineer. But sadly, application is severely neglected in several courses I know of.

The first time I came to IIT it was something of a culture shock. I had somehow during my IIT-JEE phase idolized IIT and when I finally came here the bitter realization dawned upon me that my idol did ultimately have clay feet. Over the last three years I have had several long discussions with my friends, and some of our grievances translated to solutions would be like the following:

• Make term papers must for every subject taught
• Abolish midsems. Instead use that time for holding term paper seminars where the whole department along with external evaluators attend. 
• Wherever possible, emphasize the industrial aspects of the course, and include industry visits.
• A good step taken has been to delink laboratories from their theory components and hold them as separate 2 credit courses but its still not enough. Make them 4 credit courses where the evaluation will not be through a viva-voce at the end, but continuous and throughout the semester.
• Make the students DO something in the lab. Make them do with their own hands. I cannot overemphasize this point. Its no use taking them to the AFM laboratory, show them a shining machine, while a PhD will talk about it for four hours. The very very serious students take notes at the front, most doze off at the back. And what do the students learn? Zilch. After all it ceases to become a decent lab, its just a guided tour of the Institute's experimental facilities.
• In the end semester exams, make every exam open-book. Set conceptual questions, not questions which will only test rote learning. If you can't set a decent open-book exam at the end it just shows that you have to either change the course or the teacher.
• Finally, do not teach courses that are fast becoming obsolete just for the historical necessity of it. Look forward. Don't keep the cutting-edge research topics at just graduate levels. Introduce their wonders to the BTechs too. They more than deserve it.