THE IIT factories

If IIT coaching classes do more harm than good by cranking out masses of problem-solving automatons who can’t think for themselves, then what’s wrong with Kapil Sibal’s proposal to marginalise them by giving weightage to Class XII marks?

DNA spoke to a cross-section of IITians past and present, educationists and faculty to get a fix on an industry that’s perhaps become too efficient for its own good.

Last week, the Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal mooted — and hastily retracted — the idea of raising the qualifying Class XII percentage for IIT-JEE from 60 per cent to 80 per cent. His logic: “Because the coaching centres are giving training for the IIT entrance, students are not studying seriously for class XII exam and giving more attention to entrance exam. We want to get rid of the coaching centres by giving more weightage to the board exam.”

But is it that easy to “get rid of” coaching centres? Is it possible at all? Can a student today realistically hope to get into an IIT without going to a coaching class? All our attempts to track down students who got in without ANY help from coaching centres drew a blank. Every single IIT-ian has at least referred to the study material of these coaching factories, if not actually attended the classes.

Pradeep Gupta is one who has had minimal contact with the coaching industry. “Yes, I did attend coaching classes but it was for just three months before the exams.” But Gupta, who is today the chairman of publishing giant, Cybermedia Group, went to IIT in 1972-75. That’s more than thirty years ago. In the intervening period, coaching classes have morphed from being a supplementary resource to becoming the mainstay of IIT preparation. In the process, they’ve tended to cannibalise a student’s academic involvement in the school curriculum — the trigger for Sibal’s threat. And Gupta’s three month fling with coaching centres has turned, for today’s IIT aspirants, into a long-drawn, painful affair that begins as early as Class IX, trundles on for four years, costs a lot of money, and often ends in heartbreak.   

The coaching class craze has become so acute today that some of them even have entrance exams, and there have sprung up institutes which specialise in ‘coaching’ students to crack the entrance exam to these coaching centres (see box). And students join such classes in the belief that, once they manage to get into these ‘prestigious’ IIT coaching centres, the odds on their making it to IIT are that much better.

V Subramanyan, a former Geology professor at IIT, Bombay, agrees that “students neglect regular studies from class XI because there is tremendous craze to enter IIT; as though JEE is the only thing in the world. They have no interest in their regular curriculum. The move by Kapil Sibal is to ward off this effect.”

But that is not the only pernicious fall-out of coaching classes. Says IITian Sriram Gopalan, who opted for self-study, “Their coaching is more about remembering formulae and short-cuts. They do not cover the fundamentals, and only teach problem solving techniques.”

This extreme focus on problem-solving often has an adverse impact once the student gets into IIT. Says Karthik Shashidhar who graduated from IIT, Madras in 2004 and now works as an investment banker in Bangalore, “At IIT, we refer to the coaching centres as factories. I went to the biggest factory - BASE. But it was low intensity compared to most others. We have seen that more intense the preparation, worse they do at IIT. I have seen fairly sad cases of people dropping out, taking 6 years to complete the course and so on.

Those who overstretch themselves to clear the JEE, tend to take it easy once they get into IIT. They just give up in life later. It could also be that people who don’t have the aptitude somehow manage to scrape through with intense coaching, and then can’t cope at IIT.”
Admits M Thenmozi, professor in IIT, Chennai, “Students from coaching classes do become more mechanical, they are not willing to think, and find it difficult to cope with the curriculum in the first year.”

Yet both academics and students agree that coaching classes exist because they have a job to do and do it well. Says IITian Aravind Gopalan, who works for IT company, Cisco, “Coaching classes give you many advantages. One, exposure to new problems and solution techniques: you would be stumped if you saw a given problem for the first time, and it would take you a long time to solve it, if at all. Second, practice, practice, practice. Third, they train you for speed and accuracy — you see a known problem, you apply the pattern and make sure you do not make a mistake. They make sure you know all the possible patterns. As an aspiring JEE applicant, you want all the advantages you can get to clear it.”

Former vice-chancellor of Anna University and educationist A Kalanidhi believes the fault lies not with coaching classes but with the IIT selection process itself. “If the IITs are looking for creativity in students, then their very method of selection is wrong. How can the criterion for selecting a student for mechanical engineering be the same as selecting a student for computer science? Under the present system of evaluation, students need guidance and these institutes are providing it in a systematic manner. When they are providing results in numbers, why blame them? They are supplementing what our educational system is unable to provide.”

Maybe Kapil Sibal could do with ‘coaching classes’ himself. His zeal to revamp India’s higher education system is of course, laudable. What the part-time poet needs to do, perhaps, is to rein in his ‘creativity’ within the bounds of verse and adopt more of ‘problem-solving’ approach, an approach all IIT-ians are so, so good at.

Inputs from D Ram Raj (Chennai),
Malini Nair (New Delhi), Shilpa C B (Bengaluru) and R Krishna (Mumbai)