Drowsy Dissertations - VOL III

Top ranked American engineering schools are generally perceived to be far better than most engineering universities across the world. I myself have witnessed at close quarters the education here and the one we got back home. This post is an attempt to contrast the two and understand what a university like IITK could do to improve the quality of its students.

The first thing that distinguishes an American university from IITK is the enormous amount of research output these places have. Most professors here are regular publishers in quality international conferences/journals. Of course, that cannot be counted as a shortcoming of Indian universities. It is simply a natural and expected effect of the fact that India is not at the cutting edge of technology while the US is. Also, the insane amounts of R&D dollars that float around in America automatically act to drive researchers forward - a facility that Indian researchers do not have!

My second point concerns the quality and motivation of students. While the quality of students we get in IITs is exceptional, often their motivation levels are not. For example, I know batchmates who were not really interested in Computer Science but since they bagged rank so-and-so in JEE, they enrolled in it nevertheless. In the US, the choice of stream is often dominated by the interests of the individual. As a result, most students here are very highly motivated to do well in the field they have chosen. Once the interest is there, work seems like play and the effect on performance is clearly visible.

These of course are issues about which nothing can be done. For instance, IITK cannot increase its research output overnight or even over the period of an year. Similarly, social attitudes in India regarding career choices will also not change anytime soon. Even then, I feel there are a number of other small improvements that IIT Kanpur can make to improve the quality of education it provides to its students.

For one, I feel that following a textbook while teaching a course is a big plus. Textbooks serve to make the concepts presented in class concrete. Also, the written word is a more precise medium of expression. Verbal communication is good for imparting intuitions, but it is only when an idea is precisely written down that it is conveyed in its entirety. Most professors at IITK refuse to follow books. The most common reason cited is that the stuff they plan to teach is not part of any single textbook. However, my impression is that at least for the basic undergrad level introductory courses in OS, Databases, Compilers etc, the course content is fairly standard and well covered in many books. Even in a course like OS which is taught very well at IITK, following a textbook has the advantage that long after when the course is over, the student has something to refer to!

The other thing which I feel has a great impact on the understanding of students is the use of assignments as learning aids. In most courses at IITK, generally only programming assignments are emphasized and written ones are only handed out in a few courses. Most Stanford courses however, have weekly assignments which test the understanding of the concepts presented in class. In almost all these courses, assignments comprise a significant percentage of a person's final grade. This has two advantages: the student is forced to be up-to-date as the assignments have to be submitted on a regular basis, and assignments are good places to ask questions which are difficult to ask in exams. For example, given an algorithm, perform a dry run on a particular input. Such mundane questions are rarely posed in exams. However, doing two or three dry runs is often critical to understanding the quirks of the algorithm. Then, there may be questions which are too difficult to ask in a timed exam. They also are ideal candidates to be posed as assignments.

I guess these two things shall go a significant way in improving the calibre of IITK students. Of course there are potential concerns. Following a textbook might lead to a further fall in attendance in classes. Take-home written assignments might fuel more incidents of cheating and academic fraud. However, my take is that these are mostly orthogonal issues which need to be tackled separately.