Devil's advocate II - The JEE

It is now well past 1 am, and hence well past the time when I am expected to be both awake and sane. It follows therefore that I must do something insane now, such as getting into an argument over the internet.

Now, contrary to what this post's title seems to indicate, I am not going to argue that the government's decision to scrap the JEE was right: to be sure, I know little or nothing about that decision to make any informed argument whatsoever. I am, however, mildly pissed off at the flurry of Facebook shares this decision has caused, and at the number of "Save the JEE" banners that have cropped up. Pissed off partly because, hey, this is hardly the biggest issue right now worthy of attention (hear hear, so said the guy with a blog post on the topic!) but also because for some reason people seem to have this highly romantic view of IIT, almost as if it is some sort of coming of age ceremony; you know, something that separates the "men" from the "boys". The sexism in that statement is very much intended.

To be more precise, here are some of the arguments that are put forward, and why I think they are bad.

1. "It promotes a level playing field". It does not, rather obviously. Anyone who has been through the IIT system will know that quite a majority of students who get in are those who went to some coaching institute or the other, which is of course a monopoly of the privileged. This argument doesn't even deserve a rebuttal. 
2. "It tests raw intelligence". A milder version of 1., according to me, and subject to the same fallacy.  I have heard/seen people argue that the prevalance of coaching centres is just a small flaw that can be plugged. Not so. A little bit of thought will tell you that there can never really be an examination which does not favour the privileged : imagine two children of identical innate intelligence, the one unschooled, working perhaps for most of his childhood, and the other an upper middle class kid sent to the best schools. By the time they give the exam, the latter very simply has just had a lot of time to think, not withstanding the schooling. Intelligence grows with time, with experience and with education. Short of putting an electrode into the skull at the time of birth, there is no real way of checking "innate intelligence" or "creativity". If such things exist.
3. "JEE establishes IIT as a global brand". That is, to me, a totally meaningless statement. What are we more concerned about, providing higher education or creating brands? True, the IIT brand helps us graduates along quite a bit, but saying that the purpose of the JEE is to give IIT a brand name makes JEE sound like those annoying stickers on apples that say that they are imported, and that are annoyingly hard to remove.
4. "You need a difficult exam because studying at IIT requires some caliber." Well it's not supposed to. They are undergraduates for God's sake, IIT is supposed to provide them with caliber. I was a teaching assistant for Dan Klein's undergrad AI class last semester (we had 400 students in that class. Hear, ye who say that IIT has too many students, although we were 7 teaching assistants), and the one thing that the class taught me was that it is possible to have a course that doesn't require superhuman "intelligence" and yet teaches a lot. The assignments were extremely simple by IIT standards  (you could do them in a couple of hours), yet a lot more engaging and interesting than most (probably all) of the assignments I have ever done at IIT, and their coverage of the material couldn't have been better. In any circumstance, if a teacher cannot teach a student something, it is by definition a fault of the teacher. No one said teaching was an easy job.

There, that's it. I have vented my feelings. In short, the JEE isn't the sparkling jewel in a messed up education system. Quite the contrary: it is merely the sad and unhappy marriage of a higher education system that can't find enough teachers and a sickly mindset that forces engineering dreams like straitjackets onto innocent children.

And like it or not, we are the children of that marriage.

Adios.

[UPDATE: Abhishek in his post rebuts a lot of the other arguments that people have against passing the JEE. If you need any more convincing you should read his post. I especially like these lines (I couldn't have said it better):
"If you have any competition of academic perseverance, choose the best five(?) thousand out of five hundred thousand, pack them off to sanctuaries and drill them in technical knowledge, you are bound to unearth a few diamonds. Those diamonds reflect some of their light on all that 'made' them, viz. the academic contest and the sanctuary. And the latter become holy."
]

G

Wrote a story! Read it here:
G.pdf

It's not a very good story, but it came to me almost whole, and I've learnt it's usually not good to stifle such stories.

Also it has a liberal sprinkling of science, mainly about vision science. I will not claim that the science is accurate, but it is accurate to the extent that it is based on reading half of a random vision science paper. If you want to know, the condition I talk of is, I think, called "visual agnosia", but I have had no interaction with anyone who actually has that condition; this is entirely my imagination. So pardon me if I am completely off-track.