Posted by: Aadisht on: September 5, 2008
Faced with the same problem – most education having no relevance to job skills whatsoever – Charles Murray and S Mitra Kalita come up with diametrically opposite prescriptions. Murray recommends using certifications instead of degrees as entry requirements for jobs: The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: August 25, 2008
P V Indiresan, the former director of IIT Madras has a comment piece in the Times of India today on how the JEE has run its course. His prognosis is gloomy – there’s no way to improve the entrance test without decreasing the number of applicants: World-class universities like Harvard and Stanford get 10-11 applications [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: August 19, 2008
Sorry, couldn’t resist that title. Andy Mukherjee has a column about the IITs making the admission criteria public, how coaching factories are skewing the results, and how there’s no readily apparent way to get through this. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said in Indian newspapers, but it puts everything together much better.
Posted by: Aadisht on: June 17, 2008
India Today (which I read only because my guesthouse had nothing else except Femina) has a report out on how Arjun Singh and/ or the Ministry of Education has found objections to all the National Knowledge Commission’s recommendations except the one on increasing government funding for university education. It seems Arjun is determined to spoil [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: June 9, 2008
So the five month old DU Economics post had this reasonably long comments thread which instead of discussing DU or economics itself ended up discussing the stud-fighter framework, the best sort of examination system, what it is that an examination system should actually be examining, and the difference between CBSE Boards and the JEE. I [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: January 9, 2008
Skimpy has been writing about how people with an Economics background from Delhi University have abysmal conceptual clarity about the subject. Ok I guess I’m likely to get flak for that comment about the “BA types”. I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a few Economics toppers (undergrad) from Delhi University. And I’ve found them [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: July 23, 2007
The most important question in the world is whether God exists or not. Once you’ve decided that he doesn’t – or that even if he does, it hardly makes a difference one way or the other – the most important question in the world reduces to ‘What should I do with my life?’ The thing [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: May 14, 2007
Jaffna has a post on the Left and it’s role in Indian history education (link via Varnam). This reminds me of my experience in Class 7, where we used the NCERT textbook on medieval India. History classes mostly consisted of reading the textbook aloud. So eventually we got to a point where my teacher was [...]