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IIT heads echo Narayana Murthy on dipping quality

MUMBAI: N R Narayana Murthys statement about the declining quality of students joining the IITs has found an echo even among IIT heads. IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi says most students come with a heavy coaching hangover. There is a limit to what an instrument like an entrance exam can do. Taking school scores into consideration should allow us to get well-rounded students, he said. Gautam Baru, IIT-Guwahati director, says aspirants start preparing early. By the time they join the IIT system, they are mentally fatigued. They want to sell soaps, not become engineers. This is IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barus observation of students who often make it to IITs after long years of cramming, even when their aptitude is suspect. Many of them are not even interested in engineering, he says, an assessment borne out by where they eventually land up. Placement numbers that show over 50% graduates join managerial positions in consultancy firms, FMCG companies and the finance sector. There was a time when the IITs prided themselves in managing to draw the best from all corners of the country. But many now say the JEE has lost its mojo. The gates that lead to an Indian Institute of Technology are narrow. One needs to elbow out at least 30 other IIT hopefuls to get beyond the entry point. Its carnage. And its this that stokes the coaching industry. Few take the risk of not going through a gruellingly long training. This year, of the 13,195 who qualified for the IITs, two thirds said they took professional help to prepare for the entrance - the Joint Entrance Exam. In fact, some directors believe that this number is a conservative estimate and students who take coaching and join is much larger. Analysis of JEE 2011 shows that of the 4.68 lakh candidates who appeared, 86,719 (18.5%) had completed schooling in an Indian village. Another 1.35 lakh (28.9%) schooled in towns and 2.46 lakh (52.55%) in cities. The success rate was the lowest for those who schooled in villages (9.84%); 25.12% of those from towns and 65.03% from cities made it to the IITs. Guwahati zone showed the largest percentage of candidates with schooling in villages while the Delhi zone had the largest success percentage from cities. Most of those who made it were from CBSE schools, followed by those from state boards. Out of the 13,196 qualified candidates , 543 were from ICSE (4.11%), 7,396 from CBSE (56%), and 5,195 from state board (39.4%). In JEE 2010, among the qualified candidates 57.93% were from CBSE, 36% from state boards and 5.54% from ICSE.

                                                                                                               
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