I kept my silence for so many days because there was hope that the mercy plea of those 73 students expelled midway from IIT Roorkee will considered.
My dear and respected professors, I have a lot of respect for you. However, I believe all of you have not seen things from a 360-degree view.
Students who secure an extremely decent CGPA of 8 or 9 many-a-times get placed in MNCs with an 8-digit salary and make it to news as if they have done something incredible. It is nothing but an act of mileage sought by TRP-obsessed media. Nobody is interested in how an IIT student is actually going to pay back the debt of society.
I am writing this against the expulsion of those 73 students from IITR who made it to the institution only after clearing IIT-JEE, the 2nd toughest exam of India after UPSC (IAS). And they have passed all of their subjects too.
IIT’s grading policies are so relative that if you teach the same curriculum to all the world-famous scientists like Einstein, Newton, Plank, Hawkins, APJ kalam, CV Rao, Maxwell, Farady and many more, some of them will get CGPA “D” which stands for 4 and some will get “C” which stands for 5. Therefore, my IIT would have expelled all of them.
Being an 8-9 pointer, I can very well manage to get placed at some MNC and draw a fat salary. Perhaps, I can go for further studies. I can even go to the IIMs for management.
But there are former students such as Sonesh Jain, founder of Audegn; Pranav Lahoty, founder of Creative Mammoth and several others who after launching their own start-ups, can give placements to guys like me studying in IITR or other colleges. All of these students got a CGPA either nearing 5 or slightly more or less than that. Some of them are working towards a change in society too.
So before dubbing them worthless and not good enough to get education in IIT’s, have you considered these points?
1) Have all of them got education from an English-medium school? Were they all able to understand the lectures properly?
2) Are all of them actually interested in tech education and are the lectures interesting enough to maintain their interest in technology? If not, the students’ parents and professors are responsible for this mess.
3) Did IITR give any prior notice regarding these students’ expulsion?
4) Had any special action been taken to improve their performance?
5) Is the lecture delivery, english-speaking and presentation of subject up to the mark? (I am not questioning the professors’ knowledge. Almost all of them have at least 100 published papers in various national and international societies)
Legally those students have signed a document stipulating that their name can be struck off from college on the basis of a poor academic performance. But what is the definition of a poor academic performance? A few years ago, it was not earning minimum credits and now it is 5 CGPA. In the near future, the benchmark could be 6, then 7 and then 8, who knows.
I am not trying to mock my professors or the level of IITs. I am just trying to request you all to look from my point of view. Let us look forward to a better educational environment. Let us see education not only from the point of view of academic performance but from innovation, creation, personality development, soft skills, solving real day-to-day problems.
The recent IITR mess is a complete example of how universities destroy education. We can educate people for change and innovation only with rewards, not with punishment.
If IITs are known for their fat salary and scholars, they are also known for suicides, mental pressure and anxiety. By resorting to such brutal actions, we are pushing our next generation one step forward to suicides, mental pressure and anxiety. Each time they would think only about grades.
Although movies like 3 idiots inspired us to do only that which we are passionate about, nobody has actually adopted this sentiment in their daily lives.
Thanks for reading this.
#I_stand_by_them
#take_them_back
We are not revealing the author’s name for the fear of reprisal from the IIT-R authorities. You too submit your contributions in text or video to ireport@www.jantakareporter.com