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Columnists
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Bloggers
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Opinion: Foreign Campuses In India - Storm In A Teacup
Only a slavish, colonial mentality can suggest that we turn our Indian institutions into second class "citizens" by promising all kinds of autonomy - operational and academic - only to foreign universities.
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Opinion: Central University Entrance Test (CUET) Is Unfair To Students
Our policy-makers have an uncanny knack for finding solutions to existing problems that create even more problems.
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Opinion: Indian Med Students From Ukraine Provide A Red-Alert
For Indian students who left their country at a young age - just after finishing school - to study in an alien land, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has dealt a double blow.
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Opinion: On Omicron, Airports In India Show How Wrong We're Getting It
The entire Omicron saga seems to be one of various agencies and experts jumping guns. And it offers lessons about how not to communicate.
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Opinion: Admission Madness - The Sad Story Of 100% Cutoffs
An intelligent restructuring of the admissions process is the least that governments, board administrators and institutions can do to clean up the mess they have created and sustained for decades.
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Opinion: Without Board Exams, How Colleges Will Seek To Decide Admission
The Prime Minister on June 1, 2021 announced that the Class 12 CBSE board exams stand cancelled. Many other boards have followed suit. This is a welcome move because the safety and health of students is of paramount importance.
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Opinion: Don't Blame Covid Crisis on the "System" and "Elites"
The massive scale of illness and deaths caused by the mighty second Covid wave has prioritized both the need and the desire to understand the causes of this wave, the severe inadequacy of treatment and the horrific number of deaths.
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Opinion: India's New Move Could Produce Second-Rate Engineers
In this context, bridge courses are likely to produce a cohort of students who will mostly be "second-class citizens" among the rest of the "mainstream" students much better versed in Mathematics and Physics.
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Opinion: At IITs, With Online Exams, Teachers Confront High-Tech Cheating
To police examinations in the current online scenario, we ask students to write answers on paper sheets while keeping a mobile phone or a laptop camera focused on them so that the proctor can see them working. Sometimes, we ask them to work on one device and use the camera of a second device to display the live video.
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Opinion: What We At IITs Are Discovering About Online Classes
There is plenty of hype floating around that "digital" is the future of education. Our experiences related to online teaching during the pandemic show shatter this hype.
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Opinion: Can The New NEP Really Reform Education In India?
Finally, the New Education Policy (NEP-2020) is out, though it is somewhat surprising that it comes bang in the middle of a pandemic, and when parliament is not in session. Even though almost two lakh suggestions were received as feedback on the draft policy (DNEP-2019) not much debate about these has been seen in the public domain.
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Opinion: India's "Vaccine Games" On Covid-19 Come At Great Risk
Our penchant for somehow "topping the class" is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche. Now, we want to be the first in the world to develop and produce a Covid-19 vaccine, even though many other potential vaccines in the fray are far ahead on the developmental trajectory. One way to win this race is to just declare that we will get there first - and even announce a d...
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Opinion: The Far From Magnificent Obsession With Ranks At IITs
The world's best institutions do not worry about rankings but in ensuring that they are respected by their peers for the quality of their graduates and research. They have not reached the top by trying to be "first". We should remember what we tell our students: if we study well , we are likely to get a good grade, but getting a good grade does not necessarily mean we...
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Opinion: After Weeks Of Online Classes At IIT, Here's The Truth
It is good that we have online options but let us not kid ourselves into the illusion of normalcy. It is worrisome that despite ground realities of this sort, a sense of digital triumphalism seems to hang in the air.
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Opinion: IIT-Bombay's Adaptation To The Lockdown - What Works And Doesn't
The two great issues that will surely be impacted by the lockdown are admissions into the IITs and the employment of students from the graduating batch.
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Opinion: At IITs, 1-Cr Job Offers Are Hype, Ground Reality is Different
Bits and pieces of such situations are written about in the media but all of this is overshadowed by the "1 Cr +" salary hype.
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Opinion: Indian Universities And The Problematic Race For Eminence
The penchant for "standing first in class" does not affect only students, it has infected academic institutions as well as they strive to be designated an "institution of eminence" by the government.
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Opinion: 4 Things Need To Urgently Fix In India's Education System
We did not really need a policy document; what we need is an action document on strategy and implementation, one that identifies the few most significant issues and then details how these can be tackled.
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Opinion: It’s JEE Season – Why IITs Still Rely On It For Admission
A more basic issue is whether board examinations are a good measure of the attributes needed for a specific type of study. When so much of our board examination testing dwells on memorizing, regurgitating specific points mentioned in texts (in that given order!), do they really assess analytical or "deep thinking" abilities?
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Opinion: The IIT-JEE: Is It Really The "Toughest Exam In The World"?
As long as inadequate and bad schooling exists and the difference between the number of aspirants and available seats remains huge, coaching of the Kota sort will thrive. Ultimately, it is only good schooling that can make them irrelevant.
