Una verdad simulada

Post-graduate schools in India face a big problem: With may be a few exceptions (ICT, Mumbai, my undergrad institute is one such exception), we do not get a consistent pool of good students joining our graduate programme. Just to give you an idea, in the four semesters that I have been here, we have recruited 0, 8, 6 and 2 PhD students. Of them, a few have already quit the programme. The number of recruits to our MS programme has been even lower. The only graduate programme where we consistently get students is the M.Tech. programme, which can be considered as a largely course-based programme.

In order to counter this, IISc has decided to not use GATE as an admission criterion for their PhD programme. Giridhar disagrees and feels that GATE is necessary as a standardized test. Abi, on the other hand, welcomes the move of admitting graduate students without a GATE score to the PhD programme. Last year, Arunn made a case in favour of using GRE as a standardised admission test for graduate school in India.

Here is my take on this issue. Most of it is a summary of arguments already made by others. First, the advantages of GATE exam: it is a standardized test, designed to evaluate students from different parts of the country using a common measure. Since it is supposed to test the knowledge (or extent of preparation) in the major course of study, it should be a good indicator — in theory — of how suitable would a candidate be for the proposed course of study. If someone is incapable of securing more than a bare minimum threshold, s/he is likely to struggle in the grad school.

Next, the disadvantage of the current format of GATE: The exam is designed, not to test the skills students have acquired during the undergraduate course of study. Instead, the exam follows a certain pattern and students well-trained on that pattern do well. With multiple choice form of the test, it is not necessary for students to know the right answer; they can do well by just playing the odds. In fact, in the students I have encountered, there seems no correlation between GATE score and performance in the courses.

Regarding the disadvantage of GATE vis-a-vis alternate tests such as GRE: By the very nature of the test, GATE is biased against students who do not have a background in their proposed field of post-graduate study. Just to give an example, a few of our students have gone to grad schools in US and shifted to a different major (eg., Chemical Engineering –> Chemistry; [*] Engineering –> Physics; Mechanical –> Chemical Engineering, etc.). Such a shift is difficult in India; major reason for this is “cultural,” but reliance on GATE as an admission scheme is also an important reason.

The disadvantage of GRE (including AGRE) is that it does not test skills in the field of study quite the same was as GATE does and it is expensive. There are good students, who have poor English / communication skills. They are at a disadvantage if GRE were to be used instead.

Finally, the major point I want to make is that any method that relies on a single criterion for admission, such as GRE, GATE or JEE is inherently flawed. GATE/GRE does not suffer from similar disadvantages as JEE because they are not the only criterion for admission to post-grad schools. However, we tend to put too much weight on GATE scores. What we need to do is look carefully at the performance of the student in his/her four years in undergrad, use GATE not as a criterion to judge individual students but instead as a criterion to compare various individual colleges/universities. A single GATE score could be an outlier; average performance (over several years) of a college is much stronger measure of how we rate one college versus another.

That way, we will be able to say that a nine-pointer at IIT is (on an average) better than nine-pointer at (say) AC-Tech (Anna University), who in turn would be better than low-eight-pointer at IIT.

But more than anything else, we need to get the word out that doing a Masters (and even a PhD) at IIT/IISc is a viable option. Just to give an example, working with me for MS allowed one of my students to secure admission in a top-20 US university, which he otherwise would not have gotten based on his undergraduate degree alone. More of “Flight to US” will be dealt with in a follow-up post.

Update: As mentioned in my comment on Giridhar’s post, my statements about lack of correlation between GATE and performance are not based on analysis of a good-sized sample, but based on the courses I taught. The biggest caveat is that all these students were in 90+ percentile in GATE.

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