[Aside] Indian education system

Read this a while back but didn’t get time to post this until now. An article on the Indian education system, written in the context of Satya Nadella becoming CEO of Microsoft.

As an IITian who hated his educational time at IIT, I loved this paragraph:

The short point: our system is designed to keep people out, not get them in. The true value of an IIT or IIM is not the intellectual capital they produce, but their filtering expertise – which keeps all but the superlisters out of these institutions. When the people entering the institution are the best among the best, they will shine no matter what the quality of faculty or the curriculum.

Very true. All my classmates who had entered via the JEE exams performed well because they were already bright and had spent the last 3-4 years of their life preparing for the entrance exams. The rest of us, who had entered through SAT exams (during my time) or quotas, fared poorly in comparison. That’s sot of expected but what I hated was how the professors never seemed to make an effort to get the rest of us interested or slow down a bit so we too understand what’s going on. As far as they were concerned the onus was on us students to somehow make sense of what’s going on, and if we were finding it difficult to catch up that wasn’t there problem.