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Academic Dishonesty

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On Cheating, Ethics, and Academic Culture

I have been a teaching assistant at IIT Bombay since 2007. With one exception—a one-year stint in industry after completing my master’s degree—this has been a continuous association. I prefer programming- and lab-oriented courses. I also take a somewhat perverse interest in figuring out which student has copied an assignment. There have been many instances of cheating in these courses, and my intention here is to reflect on that phenomenon.

One of our professors, known for his bluntness in the classroom and widely regarded as extraordinarily hard-working (not just by local standards), once remarked that when someone cheats, he is essentially admitting his own incompetence. “Why would anyone cheat or import if he can do it himself?” he wondered. He went on to say that this applies not only to individuals but also to nations. This observation is true in its own context. I have known students who were technically weak yet did not cheat, and others who were sharp and technically sound but did not mind cheating when given half a chance.

During my M.Tech., I was close to a group of undergraduates. They were sharp and clever; one of them was perhaps brilliant. They were usually well-behaved, even in their private spaces, though their behavior during what they called “profile-reading” resembled that of a drunkard in my village during Holi. I remember visiting their hostel once and witnessing one of them call another “chutiya” while the rest looked on with amusement. It later emerged that during a lab examination, they had all been huddled in a corner cheating, and the so-called “chutiya” had refused to participate. An individual refusing to join a peer group in an activity he considers unethical is rare in our kind of society. It is also natural for a group to ridicule a member who does not take part in its activities, whether benign or evil. Still, one expects a group of students to be more tolerant of a so-called “black sheep.”

There is no doubt that cheating can be beneficial in the short run, and there are temptations—sometimes with seemingly valid reasons—to indulge in it. But we cannot ignore the fact that we live in a society that tolerates such dishonesty to a great extent. Individuals pursue their interests, not always consciously, but it is a mistake to believe that everyone pursues those interests at any cost, most of the time. What stands out here is the gall of this group in contemptuously ridiculing one of their own members for refusing to pursue benefits at the cost of his dignity.

How cheating is perceived and defined varies from individual to individual. What appears to be cheating to some may not look like cheating at all to others. Still, an academic community can define what constitutes unethical practice and can reasonably expect its members to honor that code. The best way to maintain such standards is through internal censure. When this internal censure weakens, dishonesty increases. Copy-and-paste practices in seminar reports submitted by our students are rampant and tolerated to a great extent. Last year, in a panel discussion titled “What Is Research?”, a professor remarked, “There have been cases of plagiarism in Ph.D. theses.” These cases were tolerated because they did not want to “appear on the front page of the Times of India.” This is odd: to admit, on one hand, that basic ethical standards cannot be maintained due to real or imagined fears, and on the other hand to demand greater autonomy.

Unless pointed out with great clarity, many students caught cheating do not like to see it as academic dishonesty—partly due to ignorance and partly to avoid the stigma of corruption. Who likes to see himself as morally crippled? Therefore, they devise ingenious arguments in their defense. I do not know many who support cheating in public without offering one reason or another. “Everyone does it” is one such argument they often give to their peers. It would not be hard to prove that not everyone, or even most people in this society, are cheaters. But proving a fact is one thing; being caught in a feeling is another. In a society where people constantly accuse one another of wrongdoing, it is not unnatural for individuals to believe that such behavior is the natural state of affairs.

I know at least one teaching assistant who made a case to the instructor—who was also her guide—in favor of such students. She argued that there is usually a “lack of time” to complete assignments and that it is therefore natural for students to “do what they have done.” I suspect there are many others with similar opinions. Her guide was not convinced, but he felt that punishment should not be very severe because “everyone in IIT does it.” There may be some element of truth in the insinuation that “all of them do it,” but I also suspect that the Indian mind is prone to comparing everything with the worst possible case.

Lack of time can hardly be an acceptable argument. That particular instructor had mentioned many times in class that if someone was having difficulty with assignments, he should approach him. Besides, why not submit a partial assignment? There is a very thin line between “discussing with friends” and cheating, and this line is often crossed. This need not be the case, but it is the usual experience. The “lack of time” argument for cheating is no more convincing than the argument academics often put forward for not honoring their teaching commitments—namely, that they spend too much time in meetings and committees (and, occasionally, in strikes). As far as students are concerned, this excuse sits oddly with my own experiences. These supposedly time-starved students spend an unusual amount of time being social butterflies. I do not recall many occasions when a hostel room was not either empty or occupied by more than one person chatting, watching movies, or engaging in loud and cheerful conversation. Doing individual assignments is a solitary activity, and spending time in solitude does not come naturally to an Indian who is extremely gregarious by nature.

Apart from the temptation to obtain as many marks as possible by fair or foul means, there is perhaps a conviction—consolidated by past experience and not entirely without reason—that they can get away with it, especially when they belong to a majority. This is perhaps why a cheater often begins his defense by saying, “Everyone does it,” attempting to draw strength from numbers. In a society where constitutional morality is weak and institutional foundations are fragile, the “rule of numbers” often prevails over the “rule of law.” As for the temptation to cheat, the promotion of brutal competition has its own costs: it can create a society that is callous and self-serving. In such a society, skills such as leadership, gardening, art, empathy, honesty, and the desire to help one another count for little (see The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young).

Should universities or other institutions punish these errant members? There are arguments both for and against it. It is naïve to believe that those who cheat are merely “victims of the system” or acting solely due to a “lack of time.” They know what they are doing, and they know it well. They do it to reap rewards at the cost of their profession and their institution—and perhaps at the cost of their colleagues as well. Sympathy for the young aside, they are often tolerated by faculty because the faculty themselves once breathed the same air their students breathe now. Even if we accept that these students are acting under one illusion or another, there is a limit to what a university should tolerate. These students may not care about their own reputation and dignity, but when dirty linen is washed in public, it irreparably damages the reputation and dignity of the institution. There will then be demands for external censure, which will be hard to deny—even by those who strongly advocate academic autonomy.

An academic community must convince itself of the importance of strong internal censure. If it is inwardly convinced that this is not a serious issue, then such an institution is headed toward an unfortunate fate. Lack of competence may not force people to cheat, but those who cheat habitually are not only parasitic in character; they are often deeply incompetent. No institution can survive—let alone flourish—without a competent and dignified academic community that upholds even the most basic academic standards and ethics.

End Notes

  1. Prof. H. Narayanan on personal ethics.
  2. Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating, a news report, The New York Times, September 25, 2012.

Life on a campus

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I am not of the view that most of us join an educational institute for the sake of knowledge. I also find it unconvincing that an educational institute is build solely for the purpose of ‘spreading knowledge’; no matter what their motto is. There will be few among us who are driven solely by the desire of learning, criticizing existing and producing new knowledge. For rest of us there are certain benefits to be harnessed; employment and social status being the most prominent one. A young desires both. Thus a large flock of young humanity tries to get into educational institutes. No educational institute, especially in South Asia, can accommodate all applicants it receives. So it looks for a tool to discriminate among its perspective students. The most ubiquitous tool for this purpose is believed to be competition.

Not only for admitting good students but also to function properly, the university has to discriminate among it’s members. Competition, being easyly accessible, becomes an useful tool for such discrimination. Although its efficiency as an effective discriminatory tool has been questioned by some. Nonetheless it instills a sense of fairness especially among the middle class which put a high value on social mobility through an individual effort. In contrast to middle class, working class preferred collective actions such as strike and demonstration for social mobility in addition to individual initiatives. The leadership to working class may have been provided by some other class. In the past, it was the working class which took inspiration from the middle class by arranging best possible education for their offspring. Now middle class has also learned a few things from working class. These days it is a rule rather than an exception that teachers, lawyers, doctors etc. go on strike like working class whenever their demands are not met.

The sophistication of problems in competitions has been diluted by objective kind of problems in them. Life with objective problems are convenient and may be desirable for some institutes where job requires only a tiny set of skills. But why a university shy away from subjective problems? It is regrettable that the defense of objective kind of problems is based on the fact that correcting objective kind of problems are easy. Convenience in intellectual life can hardly be of any worth.

Competitions produce their own inequalities for there could be equalities before competition and not after it. But such discrimination on the basis of merit is unavoidable. Merit is indispensable for a institute to function; merit and discrimination are the faces of the same coin. Although every society has its own rules to award the merit but you can not have merit unless you discriminate in one sense or in another.

I am not a hardcore supporter of competitions especially for pre-university students. The discomfort is for various reasons, most prominent of them is that in our society competitions are not fair. It gives an undue advantages to those who have the benefit of ‘accident of birth’. A perfect example is the unease with which some people speak about the rise of upper middle class students in IITs. In fair competition, they laments, at least equality of opportunities must be given. Those, who have the resources to spend time in concentrations camps in Kota and like centers already have an edge over those are from the lower middle class or from villages. Even if they have money, it may not necessarily translates in to desired effects since the access to information and resources are often limited. They have a fair point. One may argue that even if one has such resources, it depends on the agency of individual to succeed in competitions. After-all not all of those apply from upper middle class enter IIT’s. But it would be impossible to prove that among the millions who do not have access to such opportunity can not make it to IIT when given equal resources. The experience of ‘Super 30′ (or is it Super 20) proves that success in competition is solely not due to individual agency. The Darwinian maxim, ‘survival of the fittest’ can also be reversed : ‘Fittest is the one who survives’. As far as IITs are concerned, they do not have any problem since coaching centers improve skills of their future batch.

In hierarchical and unequal societies like ours, competitions create their own strains. Any student who had an disadvantaged beginning has to be much above the average to do the average. When they are made aware that the system has not been fair to them, they demand a place for themselves if they have a strong political presence. They put pressure on their leaders to redress this ‘injustice’. And their leaders often demand a quota for them. It is not only their belief but also a fact that they have been a disadvantaged lot due to their place fixed by birth in a highly hierarchical society. In democracy, they can get away with quota. After all the soul purpose of democracy is, as Alex de Tocqueville put it, ‘to break the chain and severe every links of it.’ Competition gives an unfair edge to those who already have a head-start, democracy brings advantage to those who are politically strong. Sometimes these two groups may head for a collision.The upper class think that others are asking for too much while the pro-reservation believes that they are getting too little. The fact that advantage of the reservation always goes to the least-disadvantaged member of the group, make reservation looks very illogical to some. Here the iron enters the soul and dirty linen of caste are washed in public.

How much degradation of performance of an university is caused by reservation? It is not at all convincing that it affect at all in long run. The experience of north American university with affirmative action proves that cultural diversity increases the health of an university. As the Indian middle class is growing and fragmenting, there will be little differences between the marks of reserved and non-reserved category. Parents of both groups, unreserved or reserved, like to arrange quality education for their children if they can afford it. Tamilnadu has already given some hints. It has a long history of reservation, as high as 69% even before Mandal II. A report in 2005 showed that there is hardly any difference left between OBC and general category (see, The little magazine, Reservation, The die is caste). But the major problem of reservation is not the dilution of talent but the animosity, cynicism and frustration it creates. For each individual promoted on the basis of caste, there will at least 10 who will feel demoralized, angry and disgusted. In an Q/A session in IIT Bombay, director of movie ‘India untouched’, a passionate pro-reservation GEN category individual, told one of such irritated anti-reservation individual who was not able to see any good thing in reservation, ‘Bhai, tumhari problem ye hai ki tumhari gand main aag lagi hai’.

Reservation is not the biggest challenge to the university. Although one can make it appears as a shark ready to swallow so called ‘merit’. I have heard few processors in IIT, and perhaps everywhere, are very much concerned about significant portion of students showing tremendous decline in their interests in academic careers. Some of them believes that one can not do anything about it but hope for the best because here in India individual shows a ‘herd mentality’. Some of them also argue that what is the use of such misfits who do not extend their professional training but effectively block IIT’s from those who could have been much better suited for academics in long term. But is there any method available to test candidates for their long term commitments? One is forced to used classical methods and hope for the best. And individual in all societies long for a career on which either he or his peer-group, to which he is emotionally dependent, put a lot of value.

In 2007, just before joining IIT Bombay for masters, I had been warned by one of my Orkut friend that time that IIT is reserved for her B. Tech. and M. Tech. does not get that kind of treatment. In fact there are few blogs written by IIT undergraduates to get a proper insight. On the campus, this is true that post-graduates and under-graduates do not mingle with each other. And it should not be viewed in disapproving terms. Neither there is any such necessity nor there is any thing wrong about it. Undergraduates generally consider post-graduates hard working (at same time also inferior. Why didn’t they crack JEE otherwise?) as well as give-up, perhaps because of their rough treatment when they discharge their TA jobs. Some of the TAs seem to forget their U.G. days or perhaps they also suffer from a common Indian disorder ‘got-power-gotta-flaunt-it’. Dual Degrees and Masters students do a lot of courses and lab-work together and also do their TAship together. There is quite a harmony among them. Initially there could be a friction, but it soothes out later. This is not to say that they are being measured equally by everyone. Indeed, at the time of our orientation, our Dept. HOD (Prof. Subhasis Chaudhary) said that They (I don’t know on whom behalf he was speaking) are proud of their B. Techs students but they have seen some nice M. Tech.’s also. Going through his profile would reveal that he got is UG from IIT.

I do not believe in IQ’s. I believe in enthusiasm and natural inclination. In India, or may be elsewhere, these common-wisdom regarding IQ has taken deep roots.[2] How would you explain that a person who can not clear an exam in first attempt can clear it in second or third with really impressive score? Does that mean that a person is suddenly has become super intelligent or does it mean that hard work always pays off? Rank only shows that one is fast enough. Most of us can be a ‘deep’ but only some can be fast enough in a competition. Although in long run, to master a subject, it does not matter whether you had some ranks or won some accolades, as long as you are ready to do hard work and give yourself enough time. If one is not ready to give yourself time and still want to become master of some subject, I think one will end up chasing wild-goose. People who are always in hurry to reap rewards will find some semi-literate professions such as management or, to borrow Prof. Milind Sahani phrase, ‘warm-body’ works more rewarding.

There is very curious pattern in post-graduates. Most of them do their UG in their home-town or home-state. Living alone and keeping the interest alive in a boring curriculum of engineering is tough if not impossible, and given the fact that a lot of them are forced (socially or psychologically) to take up engineering, it is not surprising outcome. Unfortunately it is more acute in students who are naturally creative for professional courses such as engineering which values profitable skills more than anything else, need not encourage creativity. It need not to be the case, but it is the usual experience. In under-graduation, it is very important that one should not take a very puritan stand, namely, ‘I’ll not move on unless I understand it completely’. It’s better to sprinkle this attitude over one’s whole professional career. So my observation is that we do not see very creative people at PG level (exception are there, as always!) and in their UG, they are usually ripped off of their creativity, if any. Being in home-town also make them very narrow-minded when it comes to handling different cultures. They tends to react rather than respond, have stronger moralistic arguments than of liberal/balanced arguments. And not to mention doing M. Tech. in IIT means having a seal on your documents to climb the ladder of success; at least in markets, of jobs or of marriage.

A few professors, who generally lashes out on UG’s for their lack of enthusiasm in their courses, consider UG’s smarter than PG’s. And this perception may be largely true. The U.G. curriculum of IIT is highly packed and is of great quality. Unfortunately, IIT’s still could not find a way to retain them. Any Institute which prepares its student for markets must definitely suffer from brain-drain. It seems like they have already given up on their U.G’s and concentrating more on their PGs. In IITB, they have started dual degree program (M.Tech and Ph.D) to retain their M.Tech. And I can say with certain confidence, it has been successful at least in my department. I can count many M. Techs converted to Ph.D. and it is not like that they did not get any job (the ultimate proof of one’s worth).

Prof XYZ would tell his (irritating) M. Tech. students, “Don’t do matka-pankti, first understand and then argue.” And he has a point. But there are others who admire M.Tech. for their more hard-working nature in academic courses as one of my U.G. friend Swapnil have told me one day, “One of my Prof, He said in class that UG courses are disaster. I am not going to take them. So there is a pattern of both kinds but in this pattern there is also a pattern. The PG-bashers are generally have their UG degree from IIT’s like XYZ, the PG-lovers one are usually from outside. Most of the Profs are generally neutral. But all of them are of views that if UG stays here for masters, and masters for PhD, the institute will flourish. As to say that UG’s are the best, then Maters’s and then our PhD. Anyway, most people come to IIT to get only one degree. Our UGs are technically better. They have access to good professors and much better teaching for four years.

This is not to say the there is no U.G./P.G. divide on campus. It is like a caste system where U.G. are the Brahmins, M.Techs are the OBC and Ph.D.s are untouchables. Of-course none of them dare say such thing in public but in private they will reveal something more. Once one of my UG friends told me that once an alumni came to hire and was lecturing the UGs about few things in mess, “Ye pahle aane nahi dete aur baad main sirf M. Techs bachte hai aur Matka kise chahiye..[pause, after remembering that he is not a student anymore].. No offence, I hope there is no matka here.” (They [IIT] do not allow us to come for placement early and later we find only M. Techs and who wants a Matka… [pause ..]…). One of my Prof would reveal in class that, “DD’s do not write M. Tech on their resume, they write senior graduate student.”.

A significant portion of Post-Graduate life on IIT is spend as a teaching assistant. By most accounts, life of a Teaching Assistant (TA) is quite simple. Go to the lab, do the assigned work and come back. If you are TA for a theory course then professor usually asks you to do work related with script checking, grading and other related clerk-work. There is a space for improvement but most of the professors do not want to overburden their TA’s. They generally leave them with these routine works. For a M.Tech. (especially first year) this is indeed needed. They have their own tightly packed first year curriculum. But final year M.Techs as well as Dual Degree (D.D.) sure can do more. But its up to the professor to be thoughtful as in how he can utilize them without making them feel like they are being consumed in something they do not want to be a part of. Well, there can be counter argument to this. One can simply say since you get money in exchanged of your services, you have to do what I ask you to do. But I am not a supporter that this kind of ‘money/market oriented arguments’ should be used against young people. They mostly do what is required. However I am not denying that some of them take pride in shunning their responsibilities and corruption should be dealt with. This boring part, we leave to authorities.

I found out that only a few U.G.’s are hostile to M.Tech. or to Ph.D. in start. Most of them do not show any sort of superiority syndrome in the beginning. If over the time of they somehow acquire these feelings that P.G.s are ‘give-up’, they must have their own experiences. And who can argue us out from our own experiences. Though there can be a chauvinism among them but generally they are polite enough not to communicate it to you. It’s not to say that we don’t see thoughtful people in post-graduation. There is much more to intelligence that cracking competitions. And there much more to scholarship than sharpness and speed. And of course, there is much much more to thoughtfulness than just being looking serious.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is how to get close to them without being unreasonably generous. I have certain experiences from past that being friendly with them, some of them start believing that poor performance on their part will be tolerated. They must have reason to believe so since our society has been like that where nepotism is deeply rooted and they can not be much different. There are ways to sort it out by acting professionally till you are their TA’s. But making mistakes are allowed if you have certain feedback in you to discover the error of judgment. I did over graded few of students while I was a M.Tech. initially.

One should not be thrifty when it comes to praise them when they work hard. Although praising someone for being smart has its own downside, but the criticism is the last thing an Indian kid need. We get it all the time. There are repercussion of these kind of praises which IITians generally receive – for being smart. The safest is praising for their effort. Indians are generally very thrifty and mostly jealous in praising their fellow citizen. In criticism, they will be unsparing.

Being on the IIT was the best thing that happened in my life till now. I was alone and have all the time to think. Breaking away from friends is as rewarding for academic life as maintaining a long list of friends is for professional life. And after a year in professional life, it seems to me that one generally comes at the cost of another. In fact, few argues that personal life also have its own conflict with professional life.

It’s almost impossible to find students working on their own ideas. At best they are dictated by Professors. Ideas need free time to develop. Free time is equivalent to the time you spend in privacy. Privacy is very alien to India. Since childhood, an Indian kid is told that being himself is a way of being selfish and arrogant. At home, there is no privacy. At college, this is also not possible. In fact almost all the time you see a hostel room is either occupied by two or more or empty. Only time you get students alone is on exam time, and this is time to mug-up. I wonder when they get the time to think things over and develop some their own ideas towards life rather than reacting to ‘herd-instincts’.

A widespread disease which has plagued some of the best Institutes in India, most notably civil services, is to glorify oneself at the cost of the Institute one suppose to serve. In Civil Services, a civil servant can easily been seen criticizing his/her institute; almost every time to prove that (s)he is a different pattern. I have seen that some of the students of almost every institute are now showing symptoms of this. They sometime claim that all the badness in them is caused by the institute. This is not to say that these people do not suffer. Indian, it seems, tends to greatify themselves rather than building up an Institutes they are part of. For a nation, greatness of an Individual is not as valuable as the greatness of an Institute for individual greatness dies with oneself but an Institute lives on to make few more great people. After-all institute is the legacy a generation left behind for a new one. West Bengal is a perfect example which has produced a great many individuals but not single institute of lasting values.

END NOTES :

[2] The rise of meritocracy, Micheal Dunlop Young.

Matka (M. Tech. at IIT Bombay)

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After passing the GATE 2007 exam—in fact, securing AIR 1—I applied to the Department of Instrumentation at IISc, the Department of Aerospace at IITM, and the Nuclear Technology Department at IIT Kanpur. Honestly, I am not a supporter of competitions, even if I have been successful in one of them. The discomfort is for various reasons, the most prominent of them being that competitions hardly add any social value. The boost in my confidence came at the collective loss of confidence of the failed ones. Collectively, we stand to lose even when the competitions are fair. And in India, competitions are not fair by most standards.

The more perverse thing about the competition is the rise of objective kind of problems. Prof. H. Narayanan calls them “A, B, C, D Exams,” and I liked the very sound of this notion. The worst thing is that it only allows one not to commit more than three mistakes and has the potential to convert a regular person into one of the “three idiots” in an extremely short time. In my case, it took only 10-15 minutes. Before the results were announced, branding me as one of the 100 percentiles, I was just like any other guy. It only shows that the public is incapable of seeing talent by itself and someone has to figure out who is a genius. But such discrimination on the basis of merit is unavoidable, and unfortunately, it seems it is also very necessary. Merit is indispensable for an institute to function; merit and discrimination are two faces of the same coin. Although every society has its own rules to award merit, you cannot have merit unless you discriminate in one sense or another. Although, I’d ask whether I am perceived as a genius because I was successful in GATE or I succeeded in GATE because I am a genius?

This is also true that in the case of India, this has not been a fair practice in recent years. The rise of upper-middle-class students in IIT has been a bit troublesome. In a fair competition, at least equality of opportunity must be given. Those who have the resources to spend time in Kota concentration camps and similar centers already have an edge over those from the lower middle class or from villages. Even if they have the money, it may not necessarily translate into desired effects since the access to information and resources may be limited. Well, as far as IITs are concerned, they do not have any problem since coaching centers improve the skills of their future students. But any student who had a disadvantaged beginning has to be above average to do average.

A significant portion of students show a tremendous decline in their interest in studies, and this should not be surprising since if they were made to enroll in these programs under social pressure (the glamour, parental pressure, etc.), it is bound to happen. Pressure, glamour, or awards alone cannot sustain enthusiasm; however, they can make people make choices they are not naturally inclined for. These unfair competitions effectively block IITs from those who could have been infinitely better suited for engineering in the long term. But again, there is hardly any method available to test candidates for their long-term interests. One is forced to use classical methods and hope for the best. Now, we see a lot of students getting away without doing much of the work in their degree programs (and they still expect that grades must be good, else the professor is “harami”) and “copy-and-paste” kind of theses are being accepted in institutes, including in IIT Bombay. When I say “work in degree program,” it does not mean to do what has been told, but the “idea of scholarship” is being respected.

I was slightly amazed to find out that in 2011, most of my classmates went through coaching classes for GATE exams. Some even took a year break to do preparation. Well, what can I say? The Indian middle class has a lot of double standards. What they say, what they think, and what they do hardly have any correlation. If granting reservation to people is not valid, then spending time in coaching classes when most of the other competitors do not have resources to do so is also unethical. See End Note [1].

I took an Orkut survey which I sometimes appreciated and sometimes regretted (it was my first experience of disillusionment with social networking sites). The question asked was which branch was better, implying that I had some sort of “grading” of these programs. Most replies came with the understanding that my “grading” was “good-job” oriented, which usually means “good-money.” IIT Bombay’s Microelectronics and VLSI program was the clear winner, followed by IISc Microelectronics. I had already applied to IISc, so reapplying was not possible. Plus, I wanted to be a teacher, so TA jobs in IIT would have been a plus. I had three days left before the closing date of IITB’s application process. I printed out the form, filled it, took my picture from my library card and pasted it over, went to my department, but the HOD was missing, so I had to get his seal and sign it myself (I plead guilty); I got a Demand Draft, posted it; bought a watermelon for Rs 15; came home and ate it. I was skeptical about whether the post would reach IITB in time, since Sunday was one of the days in between. Thankfully, it did, and I got the admission.

I was assigned to Hostel 9 with a roommate. It was a bit of a surprise to be put in a shared room at the postgraduate level, but what can you do when resources are limited? Fortunately, my roommate turned out to be a pretty nice friend. He later told me, when he saw our names on the form, he thought, “Well, here we go…” with a smile. He was the first person I met who bought a computer without headphones. He didn’t like music, movies, or games.

I’d tell my Orkut friends that I had forgotten to apply at IISc in Microelectronics. They couldn’t doubt it; there was no reason. I’d give them the strangest of strange reasons, like Inter-IIT sports and blah blah. Who would tell the real thing to people? Besides, I had learned something from a movie called Chicken Run, in which an American chicken had the habit of “telling people what they like to hear.” One of my friends would say, “Tum Bombay ladkiyo ki baah se ja rahe ho naa.” (You are going to Bombay for the girls). It was too hard to argue with normal people. “Yes,” I had replied.

It had been warned by one of my Orkut buddies at that time that IIT was reserved for her B.Tech. and M.Tech. did not get that kind of treatment. In fact, there are a few blogs written by Matkas to get a proper insight, one of which is this. On the campus, it is true that M.Techs (Matka) and B.Techs (Bhatka on IITD campus, Batkas on IITB campus) do not mingle very much. And this should not be taken as a disapproving thing; there is neither any necessity nor anything wrong about it. But B.Techs generally consider M.Techs hardworking (at the same time also inferior—why didn’t they crack JEE otherwise?) as well as “give-ups,” perhaps because of their rough treatment when they discharge their TA jobs. Some of the T.A.s seem to forget their U.G. days or perhaps they also suffer from a common Indian disorder “got-power-gotta-flaunt-it.” Once, I felt like punching my T.A. who was a Ph.D. Dual Degrees (Dudda) and Matka do a lot of courses and lab-work together and there is quite a harmony among them. Initially, there could be friction, but it smooths out later. This is not to say that they are being measured equally. In fact, at the time of our orientation, our Dept. HOD (Prof. Subhasis Chaudhary) said that they (I don’t know on whose behalf he was speaking) are proud of their B.Tech students but they have seen some nice M.Techs also. Going through his profile would reveal that he got his UG from IIT.

I do not believe in IQs; I believe in enthusiasm and natural inclination. In India, and perhaps elsewhere, this common wisdom has taken deep roots. Otherwise, how would you explain that a person who cannot clear an exam in the first attempt can clear it in the second or third with a really impressive score? Does that mean that the person has suddenly become super intelligent, or does it mean that hard work always pays off? Rank only shows that you are fast. Everyone can be “deep,” but not everyone can be fast enough. So, in the long run, to master a subject, it does not matter whether you had some ranks or won some accolades, as long as you are ready to work hard and give yourself enough time. If you are ready to give yourself time and still want to become a master of some subject, I think you will end up fighting and cursing shadows. People who are always in a hurry should try semi-literate but highly rewarding professions, such as management or other likewise clerical works.

There is a very curious pattern among the Matkas. Most of them do their undergraduate (UG) studies in their home-town or home-state. Living alone and keeping the interest alive in a boring curriculum of engineering is tough, if not impossible, and given the fact that a lot of them are forced (socially or psychologically) to take up engineering, it is not surprising. Unfortunately, this is more acute in students who are naturally creative, as professional courses do not encourage creativity; you just can’t learn deeply when you have to solve a problem in three hours. In undergraduate studies, it is very important that you should not take a very puritan stand, namely, “I’ll not move on unless I understand completely”; save this attitude for a Ph.D. It is better to be safe and have some achievements. So my observation is that we do not see very creative people at the postgraduate (PG) level (exceptions are there, as always!) and in their UG studies, they are generally deprived of their creativity, if any. Being in one’s home-town also makes them very narrow-minded when it comes to handling different cultures. They tend to react rather than respond, and have stronger moralistic arguments than liberal/balanced arguments. And not to mention, doing a Master of Technology (M.Tech.) in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) means having a seal on your documents to climb the ladder of success—at most in markets, whether of jobs or of marriage.

A few professors—who generally lash out at undergraduate (UG) students for their lack of enthusiasm in their courses—consider UGs smarter than postgraduate (PG) students. And this perception is largely true. Unfortunately, IITs still could not find a way to retain them. Any institute which prepares its students for markets will definitely suffer from brain-drain. (PS: In IITB, they have started a dual degree program (M.Tech and Ph.D) to retain their M.Techs). Professor XYZ would tell his (irritating) M.Tech. students, “Don’t do matka-pankti; first understand and then argue.” And he has a point. But there are others who admire M.Techs for their more hard-working nature in academic courses as Swapnil told me one day, “One of my professors said in class that UG courses are a disaster. I am not going to take them.” So there is a pattern of both kinds, but in this pattern, there is also a pattern. The matka-bashers generally have their UG degree from IITs like XYZ, while the more liberal ones are from outside. Most of the professors are generally neutral. But all of them are of the view that if a UG stays here for a Master’s, and a Master’s for a Ph.D., the institute will flourish. That is to say that UGs are the best, then PGs, and then Ph.Ds. Anyway, most people come to IIT to get only one degree. UGs are, of course, technically better. They have access to good professors and much better teaching for four years.

I was a Teaching Assistant for a lab course, and most of the undergraduate (UG) students I came across became kind of friends. They’d reveal a more forthright pattern. Let me make my stand so you can be aware of my biases; I hardly liked a typical Matka company and there was a time I avoided all of them. They’d ask very narrow and boring questions. As I told you, most of them are first-time loners and make groups perhaps to kill the loneliness, and once there is grouping, individuality is gone. This is not to say the UGs do not make groups. But grouping in UGs is somewhat different because in UG, people are amenable to a very large extent. The group shapes an individual. Ask any professor and he’d tell you how hard it is to change a postgraduate (P.G.) student. That is why the true character of IITs (or any other institute for that matter) can only be reflected by its UGs in general.

Once one of my Batka friends told me that an alumnus came to hire and was lecturing the UGs about a few things and later he said, “They [IIT] do not allow us to come for placement early and later we find only M.Techs, and who wants a Matka… [pause]… No offense, I hope there is no matka here.” One of our professors would reveal in class that, “DDs do not write M.Tech on their resume; they write senior graduate student.” Seeing his disapproval of M.Techs I’d joke, “He must have caught his wife with a matka.” By the way, he is a good lecturer and his classes are not boring.

The curriculum of M.Tech is designed to fill the gap created by second-tier institutes in their undergraduate programs. This is necessary, since most of the students come from other colleges. My department has a tradition of producing high-quality research papers, usually published in IEEE. Most of these papers are the result of a team effort, which requires a labor-oriented approach with machines, something which I disliked and would go to my guide, Professor DKS, and say, “Sir, I have compatibility issues with the staff. It’s not to say they are wrong, but I have issues.” He would give advice on how to deal with people and get things done, which I rarely took, and he gave me complete freedom to do what I liked, which I never missed. It is the professors that make an institute great; its alumni are only a by-product of this process.

Being at the IIT for two years was the best thing that has happened in my life so far. I was alone and had all the time to think. Breaking away from friends is as rewarding for academic life as maintaining a long list of friends is for professional life. And after being in professional life for a year, it seemed to me that one often comes at the cost of the other. In fact, some argue that personal life also has its own conflicts with professional life.

It’s almost impossible to find a Matka, DD, or B.Tech student working on their own ideas (and shamefully, this might be true for some Ph.D. students). At best, they are dictated by professors. Ideas need free time to develop. Free time is equivalent to the time you spend in privacy. Privacy is very alien to India. In childhood, you cannot stay alone, else they will say that you have some mental problem. At home, there is no privacy. At college, this is also not possible. In fact, almost all the time you see a hostel room it is either occupied by two or more people, or empty. The only time you get students alone is during exam time, and this is the time to mug up. I wonder when they get the time to think things over and develop some of their own ideas rather than reacting to “herd-instincts.”

A widespread disease which has plagued some of the best institutes in India, most notably the Civil Services, is to glorify oneself at the cost of the institute one is supposed to serve. In the Civil Services, a civil servant can easily be seen criticizing his/her institute; almost every time to prove that they are a different pattern (the Armed Forces have been a pleasing exception). I have seen that some of the students of almost every institute are now showing symptoms of this. They sometimes claim that all the badness in them is caused by the institute but at the same time show very little or no enthusiasm to improve the situation. This is not to say that these people do not suffer. It seems that Indians tend to glorify themselves rather than building up the institutes they are part of. For a nation, the greatness of an individual is not as valuable as the greatness of an institute, for individual greatness dies with oneself but an institute lives on to make a few more great people. Had Nehru done the same, we could never have had the working institutes as we have now. Now, it becomes our (somewhat sacred) duty to make our institutes better rather than using them for personal gain.

IITs are getting much more crowded these days. Intimacy is lost between professors and their students. For undergraduates, it is not a very big concern since most of the things taught at this level are generic, but for Master’s and Ph.D. students, this could be a valuable loss. However, this does not make an issue among them, as long as the market is able to consume them. All is well… It is a reasonably good place to build a scholarship, but one should learn to un-group in advance before making up their mind to join any institute. And if some of you can drop your utility point of view about education at home, IITB will be very fortunate to have you; otherwise, it would be otherwise. The choice is yours. We hope to see you on the campus.

The pinnacle of competitions, IITs/IIMs know very well in advance how many students will come from Delhi, how many from Kota, how many from Bombay… Sanil M. N., an alumnus of the University of Hyderabad, has information to share: “According to journalist S. Anand, ‘ironically enough, some of the beneficiaries of reservation in education were the Brahmins. In Madras Presidency College, the British Administration noted that most natives (only upper caste at that time) failed to clear the final examinations in second division (40% marks at that time). To ensure that more candidates passed, a third division (33% marks) was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century.’ Now the descendants of these incompetent upper caste who benefitted from initial reservation today celebrate the value of merit, while attempting to deprive Dalit students of such reservations.” In spirit, he is not wrong. In letter, he could be, since reservation is not relaxation of marks. The anti-reservation stand is very selfish. A state like Tamil Nadu has a long history of giving reservation (69%, before Mandal II). One could have expected that in Chennai, you would see the same kind of opposition that we saw at AIIMS. It was the most mindless agitation I have ever seen. In Tamil Nadu, the difference between General and ST category marks was as low as 10% in 2005. This difference has vanished between General and OBC a long time ago. It does not matter now. My advice to upper caste dudes and dudettes is “stop cribbing and start living!”

PS: Please note that I do not modify this blog any longer except for grammar and spelling mistakes. Some of my views have changed over time. Please consider it as a reflection of a Matka at that time.