Category: education

Size, diversity and social capital

Starting off with a “global” statement, life is full of tradeoffs.

When we listen to stories as kids, we think of “battles between good and evil”. When we watch sport, there is “our side and their side”. From stories, we are usually conditioned to “battles” where one side is superior to the other, and there is a clear “favourite” to root for.

Real life is not so simple. A lot of times, you have battles between two sides that are both bad (a lot of elections, for example). And frequently you come across situations where there are two “good” things of which you can only have one (and so the tradeoffs). One of the more famous of these is the “impossible trinity” of international economics.

In a completely different context (which I’m writing about today), two desirable things that are a tradeoff are diversity and social capital. The general theory is that the more diverse a society gets, the lower is the social capital (google is impossible in providing good links on this, so maybe ask ChatGPT).

The theory here goes that you fundamentally trust people like you and mistrust people who are not like you. The more homogeneous a society is, the more there are “people like you”, and so the more you trust. And if everyone trusts one another much more, there is more social capital.

A recent conversation and observations makes me wonder if social capital is also related to size. More specifically I’m thinking of size as in number of people in an institution.

One observation we had when we went for our reunion last week is that the campus is a lot quieter than in our time, and that a lot more rules are followed in letter rather than just in spirit (no, not that kind, but I’m talking about rules about that also).

For example, the basketball hoop in L^2 has been removed. While we pitched up a net and played tsepak in BEFG Square (where we always played it), current students informed us that they can’t play there because playing there is now banned. Students mostly hung out in their wings rather than in the common areas. After our first evening there we assumed all the students were out on holiday, while it turned out only the first years had a term break then.

I still remember my first night in IIMB (in 2004). I stayed in G Block, on one side of the aforementioned BEFG square. A bunch of people were playing Tsepak until late in the night, which meant I didn’t get good sleep (and for the rest of the week we had our “orientation” which meant I couldn’t sleep well then either). A few days later I just joined these people in playing Tsepak and making noise. “If you can’t stop them, join them”, was a perfect way to go about things back in the day.

What I remember is that, with a batch size of ~200, our social capital was pretty good. While there were some students who occasionally displayed elevated levels of conscience, we largely stuck by one another and tolerated one another (and, of course, massively trolled one another). Disagreements and fights always happened, but were largely resolved among us by dialogue, rather than inviting external parties.

With a much bigger batch size now, though, from what we were told, it appears it is not so simple to resolve things using dialogue and mediation. And people frequently take to inviting external parties. And the expected result (crane-mongoose effect) happens.

That some people want to study when others want to play now means that the former complain against the latter, with playing within the hostel being banned. Some people want to enforce the rules on spirits, and they bring in external parties, and the law is invoked in letter rather than spirit.

When social capital dwindles, in some ways, the minority rule comes into play – when there is a small but vocal minority that wants things a certain way, that becomes the way for everyone else as well. (With high social capital, the majority might be able to convince the minority that they need to be more tolerant)

Yet again, this is not a one way street. You can also argue that when social capital is too high, the minorities can tend to get oppressed (since their views don’t count any more), and so a high social capital society cannot be inclusive.

And so yeah, the Baazigar principle is there everywhere. To get something, you need to give up something. To get a more inclusive class, you need to be less majoritarian, and that means less fun on the average. When you have lots of intolerant minorities (a consequence of diversity), those “intolerant rules” get applied on everyone, and the overall payoff reduces.

A few random thoughts to end:

  1. It’s not just the class size, it’s also the fees. We paid ~ ?300,000 over 2 years as tuition fees. Many of us (who sat for campus placements) made almost twice that (post taxes) in our first year of graduation.

    Students nowadays pay ~ ?2,500,000 , so they are a lot more conscious about getting their money’s worth. And being able to study.

  2. In general, cultures change over time, so coming back after 15 years and complaining that “things aren’t the way they used to be” isn’t very nice. So yeah, this blogpost can get classified in the “not so nice” category I guess (not like I’ve ever been known for niceness)
  3. I wonder how much changed during the pandemic, when students were off campus for nearly a year, and had severely curtailed interactions even once they were back. With a 2 year course, it only takes 1 batch to “break culture”, making the culture far more malleable. So again I’m wrong to complain.
  4. All that said, it’s my duty to pontificate and so I’ll continue to write like this

JEE and academia

This is (hopefully) a quick post I’m dashing off from the sidelines of the Basavanagudi aquatic Center where I’ve brought my daughter for her weekly swimming lessons

I write this as I’m reading Eric Hoel’s post on why he is leaving academia. Basically he talks about all the “extra curricular activities” that an academic nowadays needs to do. Reviewing journals, being on student bodies and the like.

The other reason he quotes is about how restrictive academia is – again because he is being evaluated on multiple dimensions, rather than simply on the quality of his research and teaching.

Given all of this, following four years as an assistant professor at tufts, he has chosen to quit academia full time and become a writer of newsletters. and he writes that “being an academic is not so easy any more”.

I was reminded of an old post I’d written about Indian and American universities. American universities admit students based on “a holistic set of factors”. So your test scores are important but so are your sports and charity work and 10 different kinds of extra curricular activities and all that.

Indian universities (at least the ones I went to) are far simpler – they admit solely on the basis of test scores.

After reading some articles on how the US admission process was producing highly homogeneous classrooms at universities, id written a few years back on how the Indian system rocked – because admissions were based on a single criterion, there was tremendous diversity jn the classrooms on all other criteria.

Now based on Hoel’s post I’m wondering if the same is true of teachers as well – the more the dimensions on which we evaluate professors for recruitment and tenureship, the more homogeneous the professorial class gets. Instead if we were to evaluate professors on narrowly defined conventional criteria (teaching and research) we’ll get a far more richer and diverse professors body.

This, however, is easier said than done. Quality of research is usually evaluated based on the quality and quantity of papers, and papers necessarily go through a peer review process.

And if your peers are all those who have succeeded in the “selected by holistic criteria” game, then you will have to conform to some of their biases to get good papers published.

All this said, I’m hopeful that in the next decade or so we will have a bunch of new and privately funded universities which Yale universities back tk what they used to be – centres of research and teaching , with professors selected on their credentials on these axes only, and a diverse body of students selected hopefully on a a small number of axes (such as test scores).

Diversity and campus placements

I graduated from IIMB in 2006. As was a sort of habit around that time in all IIMs, many recruiters who were supposed to come to campus for recruitment in the third or fourth slot were asked to not turn up – everyone who was in the market for a job had been placed by then.

The situation was very different when my wife was graduating from IESE Business School in 2016. There, barring consulting firms and a handful of other firms, campus placements was nonexistent.

Given the diversity of her class (the 200 odd students came from 60 different countries, and had vastly different experience), it didn’t make sense for a recruiter to come to campus. The ones that turned up like the McKinseys and Amazons of the world were looking for “generic management talent”, or to put it less charitably, “perfectly replaceable people”.

When companies were looking for perfectly replaceable people, background and experience didn’t matter that much. What mattered was the candidate’s aptitude for the job at hand, which was tested in a series of gruelling interviews.

However, when the jobs were a tad more specialised, a highly diverse campus population didn’t help. The specialisation in the job would mean that the recruiters would have a very strong preference for certain people in the class rather than others, and the risk of not getting the most preferred candidates was high. For specialised recruiters to turn up to campus, it was all or nothing, since the people in the class were so unlike one another.

People in the class were so unlike one another for good reason, and by design – they would be able to add significantly better value to one another in class by dint of their varied experience. When it came to placements, however, it was a problem.

My IIMB class was hardly diverse. Some 130 out of 180 of us were engineers, if I remember correctly. More than a 100 of us had a year or less of real work experience. About 150 out of 180 were male. Whatever dimension you looked at us from, there was little to differentiate us. We were a homogeneous block. That also meant that in class, we had little to add to each other (apart from wisecracks and “challenges”).

This, however, worked out beautifully when it came to us getting jobs. Because we were so similar to one another, for a recruiter coming in, it didn’t really matter which of us joined them. While every recruiter might have come in with a shortlist of highly preferred candidates, not getting people from this shortlist wouldn’t have hurt them as much – whoever else they got was not very dissimilar to the ones in their original shortlist.

This also meant that the arbitrarily short interviews (firms had to make a decision after two or three interviews that together lasted an hour) didn’t matter that much. Yes, it was a highly random process that I came to hate from both sides (interviewee and interviewer), but in the larger scheme of things, thanks to the lack of diversity, it didn’t matter to the interviewer.

And so with the students being more or less commoditised, the incentive for a recruiter to come and recruit was greater. And so they came in droves, and in at least my batch and the next, several of them had to be requested to not come since “everyone was already placed” (after that came to Global Financial Crisis, so I don’t know how things were).

Batch sizes at IIM have increased and diversity, too, on some counts (there are more women now). However, at a larger level I still think IIM classes are homogeneous enough to attract campus recruiters. I don’t know what the situation this year is with the pandemic, but I would be surprised if placements in the last few years was anything short of stellar.

So this is a tradeoffs that business schools (and other schools) need to deal with – the more diverse the class, the richer will be the peer learning, but lesser the incentive for campus recruitment.

Of late I’ve got into this habit of throwing ideas randomly at twitter, and then expanding them into blog posts. This is one of those posts. While this post has been brewing for five years now (ever since my wife started her placement process at IESE), the immediate trigger was some discussion on twitter regarding liberal arts courses.

 

Unbundling Higher Education

In July 2004, I went to Madras, wore fancy clothes and collected a laminated piece of paper. The piece of paper, formally called “Bachelor of Technology”, certified three things.

First, it said that I had (very likely) got a very good rank in IIT JEE, which enabled me to enrol in the Computer Science B.Tech. program at IIT Madras.  Then, it certified that I had attended a certain number of lectures and laboratories (equivalent to “180 credits”) at IIT Madras. Finally, it certified that I had completed assignments and passed tests administered by IIT Madras to a sufficient degree that qualified me to get the piece of paper.

Note that all these three were necessary conditions to my getting my degree from IIT Madras. Not passing IIT JEE with a fancy enough rank would have precluded me from the other two steps in the first place. Either not attending lectures and labs, or not doing the assignments and exams, would  have meant that my “coursework would be incomplete”, leaving me ineligible to get the degree.

In other words, my higher education was bundled. There is no reason that should be so.

There is no reason that a single entity should have been responsible for entry testing (which is what IIT-JEE essentially is), teaching and exit testing. Each of these three could have been done by an independent entity.

For example, you could have “credentialing entities” or “entry testing entities”, whose job is to test you on things that admissions departments of colleges might test you on. This could include subject tests such as IIT-JEE, or aptitude tests such as GRE, or even evaluations of extra-curricular activities, recommendation letters and essays as practiced in American universities.

Then, you could have “teaching entities”. This is like the MOOCs we already have. The job of these teaching entities is to teach a subject or set of subjects, and make sure you understood your stuff. Testing whether you had learnt the stuff, however, is not the job of the teaching entities. It is also likely that unless there are superstar teachers, the value of these teaching entities comes down, on account of marginal cost pricing, close to zero.

To test whether you learnt your stuff, you have the testing entities. Their job is to test whether your level of knowledge is sufficient to certify that you have learnt a particular subject.  It is well possible that some testing entities might demand that you cleared a particular cutoff on entry tests before you are eligible to get their exit test certificates, but many others may not.

The only downside of this unbundling is that independent evaluation becomes difficult. What do you make of a person who has cleared entry tests  mandated by a certain set of institutions, and exit tests traditionally associated with a completely different set of institutions? Is the entry test certificate (and associated rank or percentile) enough to give you a particular credential or should it be associated with an exit test as well?

These complications are possibly why higher education hasn’t experimented with any such unbundling so far (though MOOCs have taken the teaching bit outside the traditional classroom).

However, there is an opportunity now. Covid-19 means that several universities have decided to have online-only classes in 2019-20. Without the peer learning aspect, people are wondering if it is worth paying the traditional amount for these schools. People are also calling for top universities to expand their programs since the marginal cost is slipping further, with the backlash being that this will “dilute” the degrees.

This is where unbundling comes into play. Essentially anyone should be able to attend the Harvard lectures, and maybe even do the Harvard exams (if this can be done with a sufficiently low marginal cost). However, you get a Harvard degree if and only if you have cleared the traditional Harvard admission criteria (maybe the rest get a diploma or something?).

Some other people might decide upon clearing the traditional Harvard admission criteria that this credential itself is sufficient for them and not bother getting the full degree. The possibilities are endless.

Old-time readers of this blog might remember that I had almost experimented with something like this. Highly disillusioned during my first year at IIT, I had considered dropping out, reasoning that my JEE rank was credential enough. Finally, I turned out to be too much of a chicken to do that.

The Puritan Topper

This was an idea that sort of got ingrained in my head at the turn of the millennium – around the time I was transitioning from school to undergrad. That you would be a topper if and only if you led an otherwise diligent and disciplined life.

For starters you needed to be a nice person (among the things this entailed for a potential topper was to liberally share notes and clarify people’s doubts when called upon). You weren’t allowed to have any character flaws. You weren’t supposed to get distracted with things like hitting on someone or being in a romantic relationship. You would talk to, and be polite with, people of the opposite sex, but “nothing more than necessary”. “Bad habits” like smoking and drinking were out of the question.

These were just the necessary conditions. On top of this, of course, you had to work with single-minded devotion towards becoming the topper. You needed to be diligent, be rigorous with all your assignments, study more than anyone else and all that.

I don’t know how this view of the “puritan topper” got formed in my head. Maybe it was pattern recognition based on the profile of people who used to top in my schools (this was after I had all but given up on doing well academically, apart from entrance exams), especially in undergrad.

I’m also wondering if this image of the puritan topper had something to do with my own giving up – while I might have had the enthu to work hard at academics and do well, this sort of a puritan lifestyle that I had come to associate with toppers (I didn’t smoke or drink, but being nice to everyone all the time was well beyond me) seemed rather daunting.

In any case, this image of the puritan topper didn’t last long. At IIMB, for example, there was this guy who lived a few doors away from me who spent most of his time drinking and hardly any time studying, but aced all exams. Another guy quickly found himself a girlfriend, but continued to top. Suddenly, I found that “normal people” could be toppers as well, and that my view of the puritan topper had been formed mainly on a small number of data points and didn’t hold.

Yet, the number of years that this puritan topper image stayed in my head means that it’s one that has been hard to shake off. A couple of years back, for example, the all india topper in the IIT-JEE, while talking to the press, expressed tribute to his girlfriend for her support. While it’s normal for a class 12 person to have a girlfriend, this comment sort of threw me off – it didn’t fit my mental image of the puritan topper.

Sometimes it is possible to form an irrational belief based on a small number of data points, and irrespective of the number of data points you see to the contrary, it becomes hard to let go of these beliefs. And that makes you more irrational. But I guess, there’s no logic to a lot of these beliefs. Maybe as Rory Sutherland puts it, it’s all “psycho-logic”.

Schools and Officers’ Wives

I’m reading this fascinating interview in the Financial Times (possibly paywalled) with my former super^n-boss Lloyd Blankfein. It’s full of interesting nuggets, as well as fodder for people who want to criticise him.

I must admit right up front – I’m a big fan of Lloyd’s. This has nothing to do with the fact that I briefly worked for Goldman when he was CEO (I had even asked him a “planted question” when he had given a talk to the office sometime during my tenure there). In general, I think he says things as they are, and his twitter account is rather entertaining as well.

Anyway, the first statement in the interview that caught my attention was this statement about why the quality of schooling has gone down over the years. “He explains that the schools were only good because the women who staffed them were blocked from jobs in business and industry.” This is complementary to a view that I’ve strongly endorsed for a while.

Let me explain this using examples from India. Long long ago, maybe until the 1940s and 1950s, most school teachers in India were men. Way too few women had the kind of education that would qualify them to teach in schools. Moreover, back then, teaching paid sufficiently to run a (at least lower middle class) family on a single income.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women in India started going to college, and started entering the workforce. Mind that it was still a massively patriarchal society here back then, and women were expected to do their “household duties” in addition to bringing home a secondary income. And this meant that many of them were in the market for jobs that offered good work-life balance.

Teaching in schools offered that sweet spot – it required credentials, and the woman’s degrees would help in that. The hours weren’t too long. There would be ample vacations through the year. Schools were found everywhere, so the job was location-independent to a large extent. This last bit was important since the women’s husbands would frequently be employed in government jobs that were transferable, and the women’s “secondary careers” meant that they would be forced to move along.

And so we saw the rise of a class of teachers that I’ve come to call (not very politically correctly) as “officers’ wives”. These were well educated women, married to well educated men who held good jobs. They were passionate about their jobs, and went about it with a sense of purpose that went well beyond making money. This meant that the standard of teaching overall was raised.

And most importantly, this increased standard of teaching came without a corresponding increase in cost. The marginal utility to the family of this secondary source of income wasn’t particularly high, so this class of teachers didn’t demand very highly in terms of wages. In any case, they were doing their job out of passion rather than for the money, and would be willing to accept below-market wages to go about their jobs.

Then, two things happened. Firstly, the presence of employees who weren’t in it solely for the money pushed down average wages, and teachers for whom teaching was the sole source of family income started getting crowded out of the market. Secondly, with liberalisation in the 1990s, the nature of the job market itself suddenly changed.

One reason why the “officers’ wives” took to teaching was that it was hard to find other employment that was commensurate to their education that gave them the flexibility they desired (if you’re a secondary income earner you need that flexibility). With the market opening up, there was suddenly a number of options available to these people that matched their skill and flexibility needs. For example, my 11th standard physics teacher quit the school midway through the year to take up a job as a software tester at Wipro (this was in 1998-99).

So, rather suddenly, the opportunity cost of teaching shot up since the teachers suddenly many more options. It wasn’t possible for schools to jack up fees at the same time to be able to continue to afford the same teachers. And so, supply of quality teachers dropped. And consequently, the average quality of teachers (holding the schools constant) dropped as well.

Putting it in another way, schools nowadays need to compete with a much larger and much more diverse set of employers for their teachers. Many of them, for the sort of fees they charge, are simply unable to do so. The “passionate bunch” has found other avenues to exhibit their passion.

And the problem continues. And from what Lloyd says, it isn’t only India that is seeing this drop in quality of teaching – the US sees that as well. It was a sort of repressed larger market that had artificially pushed up the quality of school teachers, and the drop in repression has meant that the quality of teaching has dropped.

I will leave you with the concept of Baumol’s Cost Disease.

Management Gurus

A few years back, one of the professors from my wife’s business school had come to London, and had given a talk to the alumni of the school. He was a professor of Operations Management (IIRC), and had given a talk about the Toyota Production System or some such.

At the time, my wife was working for Amazon and was completely unimpressed by the lecture. “This guy is 20 years behind”, she claimed, as she gave me a review of the lecture the same evening. The processes the professor had described were apparently extremely primitive compared to what Amazon was following at that time (I believe that).

So this got me thinking about management academia as a profession, and what value they add apart from teaching and preparing MBAs. I’ve sort of worked as one, though my position as Adjunct Professor at IIMB meant that I only taught and didn’t do any research. I did talk to some of the professors there during that time and tried to figure out what they were working on in terms of research.

Putting all this together with material I’ve gathered from Clayton Christensen’s obituaries, I think I’ve recognised a pattern that connects management research – it’s all about looking back at business over the last few years, deciphering patterns about them and then theorising about them.

In a sense it reminds me of second and third order levers. Scientific academic research is usually (though not always) cutting edge, with new science being created in the academic laboratories and then engineered in industries which then go on to commercialise this research.

Management research, on the other hand, is flipped. The true cutting edge in management happens at businesses, where the experimentation is relatively easier than experimenting with scientific stuff. Once some experimentation has happened at the business level and successes and failures have been observed, the academics get into action.

They look at the experiments that the industries did, meticulously collect data that documents the success or failure of these experiments (along with the external factors that might have affected the success or lack of it), and then theorise about the costs and benefits of these experiments, and the situations where they work (or not).

Sometimes the academics supplement their data gathering of the experiments and situations with experiments of their own, and some interviews, and then apply their deep academic and theoretical knowledge on top of it to create theories about them. And once the academic theoretical peer review process has taken place, the idea can get better traction in parts of the industry that have not already figured it out.

The competitive advantage that management academics have is that they sit an arm’s length away from the industries that they study, and they are able to gather data from large numbers of companies in order to build their theories. They may not be the originators of the ideas but their value addition in terms of synthesising ideas generated elsewhere is significant.

Teacher abuse

Historically, it has been acceptable, indeed desirable, for the teacher to abuse students. Our epics are full of stories where the teacher plays elusive, challenging students to “prove themselves worthy” before being imparted learnings.

The most famous example, of course, comes from the Hindu myth story of Ekalavya who gave a finger to his non-teaching Guru Dronacharya. Elsewhere in the Mahabharata, we had Parashurama cursing his student Karna after discovering that the latter was not a Brahmin.

It is not just Hindu mythology that has such stories (just that I’m most familiar with this). In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, for example, Pai Mei abuses his pupils, making them carry water up the hill and serve him otherwise until he teaches them the five point exploding heart technique. He drives his students to such a rage that one of them (Elle Driver) ends up killing him.

And this privileged attitude of the teacher (“acharya devo bhava“) extends to modern universities as well. It is common for advisors to endlessly push graduate students before they permit them to graduate, or to take credit for graduate students’ work (check out PhD comics.). In IIT Madras, where I did my undergrad, it is reportedly common for professors to endlessly flunk students who have pissed them off (I played it safe, so no first hand experience in this). Schoolteachers hand out corporal punishment, which is only recently making its exit from the classroom.

As part of my portfolio life over the last seven years, I’ve done several teaching jobs. I’ve taught at IIM Bangalore as an Adjunct Professor. I’ve conducted Data Journalism workshops for journalists and PR executives. I’ve done corporate training workshops.

In the initial days, I would sometimes act like a “typical teacher”, getting annoyed with students with this or that, or abusing my position of privilege in the classroom. Over time, though, I’ve come to see my students as clients – after all, they’re paying me (directly or indirectly) to teach them. And I’ve come to understand that they need to be treated like I treat my other clients – with respect.

If the fact that students are teachers’ clients is this intuitive, why is it that teachers everywhere (both in history and contemporarily) have found it acceptable to abuse students? Is it because teachers are sometimes able to hide behind the brands of sought-after schools and universities? Is it due to the concept of tenure, where professors are recruited for research prowess, and student feedback doesn’t really matter?

Or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy? Once upon a time, teachers were scarce, and could hence put up their price, and chose to extract it not in cash but in other means. And so the image of “teacher is god” got formed, and perpetuated since most students decided to adhere to it (at least when the teacher is around). To add to this, over time we’ve created institutions such as university rankings which continue to push up artificial scarcity of teachers.

Do you have any idea on why teachers abuse their clients?

JEE coaching and high school learning

One reason I’m not as good at machine learning as I can possibly be is because I suck at linear algebra. I totally completely suck at it. Seven years of usage of R has meant that at least I no longer get spooked out by the very sight of vectors or matrices, and I understand the concept of matrix multiplication (an operator rotating a vector), but I just don’t get linear algebra.

For example, when I see terms such as “singular value decomposition” I almost faint. Multiple repeated attempts at learning the concept have utterly failed. Don’t even get me started on the more complicated stuff – and machine learning is full of them.

My inability to understand linear algebra runs deep, and it’s mainly due to a complete inability to imagine vectors and matrices and matrix operations. As far back as I remember, I have hated matrices and have tried to run away from it.

For a long time, I had placed the blame for this on IIT Madras, whose mathematics department in its infinite wisdom had decided to get its brilliant Graph Theory expert to teach us matrices. Thinking back, though, I remember going in to MA102 (Vectors, Matrices and Differential Equations) already spooked. The rot had set in even earlier – in school.

The problem with class 11 in my school (a fairly high-profile school which was full of studmax characters) was that most people harboured ambitions of going to IIT, and had consequently enrolled themselves in formal coaching “factories”. As a result, these worthies always came to maths, physics and chemistry classes “ahead” of people like me who didn’t go for such classes (I’d decided to chill for a year after a rather hectic class 10 when I’d been under immense pressure to get my school a “centum”).

Because a large majority of the class already knew what was to be taught, teachers had an incentive to slack. Also the fact that most students were studmax had meant that people preferred to mug on their own rather than display their ignorance in class. And so jai happened.

I remember the class when vectors and matrices were introduced (it was in class 11). While I don’t remember too many details, I do remember that a vocal majority already knew about “dot product” and “cross product”. It was similar a few days later when the vocal majority knew matrix multiplication.

And so these concepts were glossed over, and lacking a grounding in fundamentals, I somehow never “got” the concept.

In my year (2000), CBSE decided to change format for its maths examination – everyone had to attempt “Part A” (worth 70 marks) and then had a choice between “Part B” (vectors, matrices, etc.) and “Part C” (introductory statistics). Most science students were expected to opt for Part B (Part C had been introduced for the benefit of commerce students studying maths since they had little to gain from reading about vectors). For me and one other guy from my class, though, it was a rather obvious choice to do Part C.

I remember the invigilator (who was from another school) being positively surprised during my board exam when I mentioned that I was going to attempt Part C instead of Part B. He muttered something to the extent of “isn’t that for commerce students?” but to his credit permitted us to do the paper in whatever way we wanted (I fail to remember why I had to mention to him I was doing Part C – maybe I needed log tables to do that).

Seventeen odd years down the line, I continue to suck at linear algebra and be stud at statistics. And it is all down to the way the two subjects were introduced to me in school (JEE statistics wasn’t up to the same standard as Part C so the school teachers did a great job of teaching that).

Teaching and research

My mind goes back to a debate organised by the Civil Engineering department at IIT Madras back in the early 2000s. A bunch of students argued that IIT Madras was “not a world class institution”. A bunch of professors argued otherwise.

I don’t remember too much of the debate but I remember one line that one of the students said. “How does one become a professor at IIT Madras? By writing a hundred papers. Whether one can teach is immaterial”.

The issue of an academic’s responsibilities has been a long-standing one. One accusation against the IITs (ironical in the context of the bit of debate I’ve quoted above) is that they’re too focussed on undergraduate teaching and not enough on research – despite only hiring PhDs as faculty. From time to time the Indian government issues diktats on minimum hours that a professor must teach, and each time it is met with disapproval from the professors.

The reason this debate on an academic’s ability to teach came to my mind is because I’ve been trying to read some books and papers recently (such as this one), and they’re mostly unreadable.

They start with some basic introductory statements and before you know it you are caught up in a slew of jargon and symbols and greeks. Basically for anyone who’s not an insider in the field, this represents a near-insurmountable barrier to learning.

And this is where undergraduate teaching comes in. By definition, undergrads are non-specialists and not insiders in any particular specialisation. Even if they were to partly specialise (such as in a branch of engineering), the degree of specialisation is far less than that of a professor.

Thus, in order to communicate effectively with the undergrad, the professor needs to change the way he communicates. Get rid of the jargon and the sudden introduction of greeks and introduce subjects in a more gentle manner. Of course plenty of professors simply fail to do that, but if the university has a good feedback mechanism in place this won’t last.

And once the professor is used to communicating to undergrads, communicating with the wider world becomes a breeze, since the same formula works. And that vastly improves the impact of their work, since so many more people can now follow it.