- Hi everyone.
So last year I made a video about India's JEE Advanced exam,
but I don't think that I really did it justice.
So for this video,
I wanted to invite some experts in science and engineering
to share their thoughts on the exam.
They spoke about the difficulty of the questions,
whether they thought the exam would prepare students well
for the future, and also shared their thoughts
on exams, as a whole.
I also spoke to a couple of Indian students who took the JEE
and are now doing research work here in Australia.
For those not familiar,
the JEE exam is an admissions exam
into engineering colleges,
and it's set by over a million students
competing for just a few thousand places.
You sit two papers, each three hours long on the same day,
and it's all multi-choice.
So with that, let's hear what people had to say about it.
(smooth jazz music)
- I think this is a, it's a very tough exam.
So if I was a student at high school,
and if this was intimidating, when you first read it,
I would not be surprised.
And if it's not at all intimidating for you,
then I would say congratulations,
'cause you're a very impressive kid. (chuckles)
- Well, it's really, really interesting.
- It looks pretty difficult.
For example, the question in physics,
I know I, couldn't probably can't answer, you know,
maybe most of it now.
Though, maybe 30 years back, I could do.
- You know, these exams seem you know,
they're very long, they have a very wide variety
of questions they cover and they're hard.
I think any student who comes up against these exams
is gonna feel pretty lousy by the end of it.
- I'd probably you know leave the exam room crying
if I was in year 12 and had to do this.
Yeah.
Good luck, good luck. (laughing)
(smooth jazz music)
- So when we compare this JEE exam
with some of the subjects that are taught here
in some of our universities in Australia.
So here is a question that I was looking at,
the depth of, questions that are asked
can be one difficult for students
in the first or second year who are studying
in a bachelor level in Australia.
- It's really quite ambitious that they're trying to test
chemistry, and physics, and math,
and the paper is laid out fairly nicely
in that you have to earn one mark per minute.
Looking at the questions,
a lot of them are in some sense, sort of elementary
in the sense that they use
the kind of math taught in high schools.
Although in some areas, I would say the syllabus in calculus
and a couple of other areas, go somewhat beyond
what is currently taught in Australian schools,
or currently examined in Australian schools.
But a lot of the questions are basically tricky,
or slightly sneaky, but also don't necessarily
require you to work through the question in full detail.
It was multiple choice questions.
You have to simply decide,
can I reject this possibility or not?
There is some attempt to stop people gaming that way
by applying penalties to some wrong answers,
but still it's very much a race against the clock.
- I think the mathematic questions are clever.
It looks for the person's understanding of the matter,
just rather than doing some direct questions.
So in that sense, I, you know, they're okay,
they can be done.
And you know, some of these concepts
I do even use in my course here in Master schools here,
especially those involved with a system of linear equations
and determinants and those concepts.
- So concepts like high spin and low spin,
you know again are complex.
That's something that at the university of Melbourne
in first year chemistry we would treat in second semester.
There was a question on essentially Arrhenius equation.
So rates of, a rate of reaction as a function of,
free energy, of the keeps free energy.
So here we go.
It asks you something like the activation energy,
the backward reaction exceeds
that of the forward reaction by 2RT.
So again you've got, basically I think you you'd have to,
sketch this out.
You'd have to think about, okay, if the back reaction
is exceeding the forward reaction,
what's the reaction free energy?
So it's not just the concepts that are difficult.
I think it's asking you in a way that is, that is tricky.
You have to think about,
it's not just enough to know the equation
and you know, throw in the numbers.
You've got to think about it before you get the number
that you're throwing into the equation.
And obviously, and they're not letting you
have a calculator,
so I guess (laughing) another challenge there.
(smooth piano jazz)
- Definitely this will set up a basic,
like a background and a baseline.
So you could imagine that all the IIT students
who have come with, they would have had from fundamentals.
But from then onward there are so many things to learn,
because after you come to IITs
there is still, you know,
only it will be like a bell curve, again.
You know, for example, you give an exam to a,
you know, a very tough exam,
and choose the best in the world
and then give them them another exam.
And still, again,
the performance is going to be like a bell.
But this happened to be, this is kind of something
that is, it's kind of basically needed,
basic foundations for engineering.
But I would guess, nearly the majority of them
would be ready to do for, you know, go for,
especially general education.
And that, explains why, for example,
IIT students are you know,
IIT graduates are doing well out on the world.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- I had to look at a couple of the one-hour
math sections of papers.
And I would say I would be fairly challenged to,
to get a decent result on those, in an hour.
Partly because as a professional mathematician,
I'm interested in actually telling a story,
when I answer a problem.
I want to lay out
why the answer I'm producing is the answer.
Simply being able to say well the answer is 27,
to me is not so helpful or so interesting.
And in terms of future success
in mathematics or indeed in many scientific disciplines,
the ability to reason properly,
and to explain your reasoning clearly
is terribly, terribly important.
So while I have no reason to believe,
that using the exam the way it's used,
isn't selecting very bright students
for the engineering colleges that they're going to.
It's not clear to me that it's the optimal selector of that.
And there is also the ugly question of,
of coaching and unequal access to resources.
We all know that in any educational system,
if you go to a good school,
well-resourced with the best teachers and so on like that,
you expect a better outcome.
That's ultimately the main justification for spending money
on education as a society, that if you work harder at it,
you produce better results.
But with these race against the clock style examinations,
there's a trade-off
between the students' ability in the subject,
natural intelligence and other things like that.
And they're having been trained
to do a bit examinations of this type.
- Exams can have different purpose and entry exams
that are sort of in a form of a drill type of questions,
usually require students to prepare
a lot before to practice.
Brain is like any other muscle,
the more you practice it, the better it gets.
So when you have a large pool of candidates and only small
number of spaces, usually have drill exams,
because what they're showing
is whether the candidate is serious enough,
whether they're able to practice,
and how they perform on the time limited,
pressured environment conditions.
They're not necessarily a prediction whether that candidate
will then do very well in the next step of education.
- So right now I have,
I know two students who from India's technology,
one from Delhi, other, from a Madras.
So right now they are here in (mumbles)
applying AI, artificial intelligence,
and deep learning techniques
for medical application.
So this work, they're able to do within, you know,
certain of time.
They demonstrate their skills and ability.
(smooth jazz music)
- Maybe a train is moving at this velocity, at this speed,
we need to consider, is it really possible?
Is it feasible?
And then there are questions about experience.
Have I actually seen a wide variance, more or less of this?
Is it possible? - Yeah, experience.
Is this really possible?
So those type of questions actually come from experience.
So we actually have to try out various experiments in lab.
You have to know that what exactly are the ranges,
a practicality that exists in science.
- Two marks or maybe half mark can change your rank
by great amount, it's possible.
Like, I think minus two marks can decrease the rank
by 200 or 400.
So you need to be very careful about how to attempt,
which question to attempt
and you need to be very sure about it, attempt question.
- Maybe you have for other students
that are preparing for JEE, feel that being open-minded
is what would really help right now.
All those that are thinking
of maybe starting in class 10, or nine.
I feel that they need to be open-minded.
They need to be considering that yes,
experience in lives are very important, apart from studies.
I feel that those experience can really help,
not only in JEE, but also in life.
And yeah, enjoying life is very important, with studies.
- One of my thing would be,
don't be scared of the exam hall, examination hall.
So I've experienced that in JEE, that's not good.
So be open, be free, whatever you're studying,
just pretend to think and yeah,
all the rest, all happens.
(smooth jazz music)
- Yeah. So when I looked through it,
there was a lot of the questions that,
they are based very much on this sort of principle
of memorization and recitation,
which I think is just an extraordinarily bad
educational tool because it assumes
that everyone has the exact same capabilities in that area.
And as someone who never had a great memory for these things
and had to work extra hard.
and then became a professional physicist for over a decade,
you realize very quickly that those particular skills
don't help you much at all,
once you're actually working as a scientist
because you know, scientists get to the point
where the material they're working with
is so complicated, you just don't remember.
No one could remember it.
So that, skill of memorization and recitation
is not as helpful as people might think.
In science you know, you tend to not be successful every day
of your working career.
In fact, quite the opposite.
You tend to, you know, not get anywhere for quite a while.
I mean, you'll have one lucky day
where something will occur and your training
will allow you to see that
and identify it as being special.
And that's what makes a good scientist,
but for the other 360 odd days of the year,
you'll have a pretty rough time.
And those sorts of skills,
those sorts of resilience skills,
and understanding how science and engineering work,
you know the process of falsification
is not something that is tested at all
in these sorts of examinations.
And, it's unfortunate because you want people
with those skills more than you want people with skills
with memorization capabilities.
- When I looked at the JEE math, the maths exams,
it led me to recall an interesting article
by the great British mathematician, G. H. Hardy.
Indian viewers of this blog,
will perhaps be well acquainted with Hardy,
who is generally regarded as responsible
for bringing the great Indian mathematician, Ramanujan
to the attention of the world.
And so Indian viewers should have some affection for Hardy.
You have to understand that when Hardy was a young man
and through the early stages of his career,
mathematical education in the United Kingdom
was governed by the Mathematical Tripos examination
for Cambridge undergraduates.
This was a highly competitive examination.
An examination of great difficulty,
in the sense that it required a large amount
of preparation and training,
paying for professional coaching, and so on like that.
And on the basis of your Tripos result,
this could lead to academic possibilities,
but also to high positions in the British Civil Service
and the Colonial Office and things like that.
In fact, it was viewed generically
as some kind of way of detecting
deep intellectual superiority and ranking people.
And Hardy didn't have much time for that.
Hardy was actually quite a fan of examinations
and quite a fan of lecturing, as I am.
And this is unfashionable these days.
What he was not comfortable with was the Tripos,
particularly in the first version,
in which he encountered it.
In order for the exam to work the way it did,
a kind of culture had built up,
in terms of the setting of the questions,
the kinds of questions, and so on like that.
And most of these had very little to do with mathematics
that was either practically used
or intellectually interesting,
or anything recent in mathematics.
It was basically playing certain games.
The examiners would try and set slightly sneaky questions
on certain topics, and students would hope
to have practiced lots of questions
of a vaguely similar type
in the hope that they could get through this.
And Hardy saw this,
as actually warping mathematical education
in the United Kingdom.
So Hardy's argument was, examinations of the Tripos style
are not a very good way to rank people intellectually,
and therefore perhaps,
one might consider doing things differently.
It would be drawing a long bow to claim
that the JEE Advanced Examination
suffers from the defects of the Tripos.
Nonetheless, there are elements of analogy there,
particularly the issue of expensive coaching
and the diversion of students
away from studying subjects and developing their abilities,
and instead teaching them to do certain kinds of questions
at great speed, which is not actually,
something of great use either in the practical applications
of mathematics in the real world,
or in academic mathematics,
scientific research or scholarship.
(smooth jazz music)