iit news.

JEE rank holders have started ditching Computer Science:

Of the top 100 JEE rank holders, about 15% have opted for electrical engineering despite securing seats in computer science.

This year, of the 54 top 100 students, 10 have ditched computer science and engineering and chosen electrical engineering as their first preference.

As admissions opened in the new IITs at rank 600, the topper at IIT-Hyderabad chose electrical engineering. IIT- Gandhinagar also opened admissions with the same stream.

Quota system does not seem to be working at IITs/IIMs:

IIT Delhi has decided to terminate 25 students, many of them from the scheduled caste category, for poor performance.

We found that quotas don’t work as well in the IITs, where the demands for academic excellence are higher.

At IIM, Kozhikode, the highest salary earned by a general category student was Rs70 lakh this year; the highest earned by the SC/ST candidate was just Rs13 lakh.

According to information provided by IIT-Powai in Mumbai, 21 SC/ST students were asked to terminate their undergraduate BTech course in 2006-2007.

“It is generally assumed that reserved category students, on an average, score 20% less than their general category counterparts.”.

200+ students to get PhD from IIT-Bombay:

Of the 252 research students, 167 are pursuing their research in engineering, 66 are working in the area of pure science and the rest are into humanities and management.

Of all the doctoral students likely to graduate this year, most are from the chemical engineering department.

In 1974, all the IITs put together gave the country 184 PhD students.

Even IIT-Delhi saw 140 PhD degrees this year.

Less than 1% of engineering graduates go in for research.

Update:
Thanks to the comment from DalitForDalits, I checked out this link which talks about the discrimination students faced from IIT Delhi professors:

Physics professor was taking my viva and I was not able to answer then she became very annoyed and asked me, “Are you from quota?” I said, “No.” Then she said, “Quota means SC/ST.” (and not Kota, Rajasthan).

When I asked for my re-examination, the professor immediately replied, “Reservation lekar IIT mein aa jate ho aur exam bhi nahi dete.”.

The professor started saying that reservation is unjust as undeserving students from reserved category are selected while upper caste students who are meritorious are left out and indulge in theft and robbery.

One professor showed my records to the two neighbouring Professors and said in hushed tone, “SC student”. Then one of the Professors said, “ok, let him go”. No body asked anything about my problems. I felt it was utter waste to attend the SRC meetings.

bomb blasts affected “iisc life”.

Predict-and-win contest.

It was being felt that iisc life would reach 20K mark by the last day of the month, but Bangalore bomb blasts changed the scene drastically. In a single day on Jul 25, there were 3000+ visits to the blog, crossing 22K. The winner of predict-and-win contest is Sachin, whose prediction, Jul 30, is the closest.

It is worth mentioning that Meghana, one reader, had predicted Jul 25, but when she tried to comment on the post, it was already 10 tics past 17K and hence could not enter the competition.

iisc life makes a mark.

WordPress has a list of top posts of the day. iisc life ranked 52 amongst all posts in WordPress on Jul 26, 2008. Check it out here.

It was a second achievement of iisc life, when on the same day, it was ranked 8^th fastest growing blog. Check it out here.

Thanks to all of you for the accomplishments.

google trends: indian colleges.

Often, search volumes and visits to websites suggest people interests. The good thing about quantifying such entities is not only that you can say A is better than B, but also A is X times better than B.

Google Trends gives an option to compare volumes of multiple searches. This is the result for IISc vs IIT Bombay vs IIT Kanpur vs IIT Delhi.

This is the result for IISc vs IIT Bombay vs Harvard vs Stanford vs Princeton.

It is evident and expected to have a gap between Indian and these foreign institutes — but these images serve well to quantify — and the ratio may be surprising to some. Although, for Indian colleges, the search volumes have been almost constant over time, one can see steady decrease in the search volumes for Harvard, Stanford and Princeton — that too despite the slight increase in the news reference volumes for these colleges. Does this suggest some trend?

There is also a new provision in Google Trends to see number of daily unique visitors to some sites. Here is the result for iisc.ernet.in, iitb.ac.in, iitk.ac.in, iitd.ac.in.

This is the result for number of unique visitors for iisc.ernet.in, iitb.ac.in, harvard.edu, stanford.edu, princeton.edu.

It is interesting to see a sudden drop of visits to these sites during Christmas time.

If you happen to try some interesting trends for colleges, do post a link.