IISER Admissions 2010 : A cruel Baboo designed Theater of the Absurd.

                                           

I have been troubled by the IISER admission issue for some months now, with my daughter's needs serving to focus my mind on it. Now that the issue of her personal benefit is almost settled (Although she topped the Chandigarh Tricity ICSE Medical and Non-medical results she has been denied a chance to compete for IISER admission even though just 0.3% short of the 93.3% Class XII cutoff for ICSE (based on 2009 results) and 94.2% in Class X relative to 95.6% cutoff based on 2007 Class X results).

As a parent I am quite upset,  as an academic I am puzzled about what should be my honest and upright attitude to the very fixed responses of the IISER bureaucracy on the issue of the distorted norms adopted by them for determining eligibility for IISER admission. I am trying to get some closure by thinking it through. However the more I think about it the more bizarre, defective and unexamined the whole rigged up scheme of IISER admission channels seems to me. The first two channels of admission to IISERs i.e via KVPY and IIT-JEE, though also defective inasmuch as they discriminate against Biology and perhaps Chemistry majors, are of minor importance in the overall scheme, since the bulk of admissions will be done through the so called third or Direct Channel based on school leaving marks. It seems to me that the debate on this channel so far has uncovered a glaring defect arising from the non-currency of the cutoffs used, but several fundamental issues concerning the very nature of the third channel have somehow remained completely unquestioned.

The IISERs were set up with much fanfare to extend quality scientific education and research opportunities to a much wider section of our young people than previously available in most parts of the country. To my knowledge the admission process was to be entirely merit based with no reservations other than a relaxation in cutoff marks available to SC-ST/OBC students to the extent of 10% / 5% concessions in the cutoff marks . However the third channel has imported a completely novel scheme of offering the top 1% cohort of each of the 29 School boards in India a chance to apply for admission to the 600 or so integrated 5 year MSc seats on offer at the various IISERs this year (of which perhaps 20% at most may be filled via KVPY or IIT-JEE scholars). Note that this is just a chance to apply and not admission itself. For normalization I believe about 900 applications have been accepted in this channel in 2010 though this remains to be extracted by RTI from the JAC-IISER. It also remains to be seen who these candidates are, how many of them will be offered admission and how many will finally join.

What is indisputable is that –apparently to circumvent the difficulty of normalizing the marks of different boards and thus to avoid injustice – a new principle has been used to determine merit according to the school Board origin of the student. Due to this novel new principle the entry level qualification varies from 68.1 %(Nagaland Board) to 95.6%(ICSE Board ) i.e by 27.5 % at the CLASS X level and from 67.2%(Jharkhand) to 95.8%(Viswa Bharati Board) i.e a 28.6% variation at the Class XII level ! These cutoffs are also known to exhibit yearly fluctuations to the extent of 5% as thoroughly discussed by Prof. A. Nangia in a scholarly article in Current Science (CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 98, NO. 11, 10 JUNE 2010) . Another absurd aspect of these cutoffs that has emerged from an RTI enquiry addressed to DST is that they are based upon figures provided by the different School boards irrespective of the stream taken by students ! Thus the cutoffs used to determine eligibility for science students may well be based on the performance of Commerce or other students besides being based on a previous year’s performance !!

At the very least one must conclude that the School Board results are considered almost completely unreliable to evaluate relative merit ! However the Baboos of the DST and IISER have ventured to cut the Gordian knot of determining the relative worth of different Board results by imposing at one fell swoop an equivalence ( for determining scientific merit for scholarshiops and IISER admission) between 67.2 % in the Jharkhand board to a score of 95.8% in the ViswaBharati Board or 93.3% in the ICSE Board ! This presumption is so absurd that it leaves one speechless. Any person with the slightest knowledge of Indian social reality knows that such an equivalence is completely untenable. All attempts to persuade these baboos that these manifest spatio-temporal fluctuations demand that the candidates falling within a reasonable band of variation must be permitted to compete for the IISER admission test have fallen on deaf ears. The JAC-IISER Chairman and the other science bureaucrats have stonewalled very attempt to prevent a whole year’s crop of rare aspiring scientists from suffering a grievous humiliation and disappointment due to the out of hand rejection by the IISER admission system. Short of a pronouncement from a High Court of Law there seems no way that some balance may be brought to this theatre of the absurd in which Baboo Red Queens run riot and lay down absurd equivalences as life and mind shattering Laws.

An absurd and cruel injustice will be perceived by the thousands of students denied a chance to compete when they are near the top of the best All India School Boards such as the CBSE/ICSE (to which it is well known that the best students gravitate ) while students who have as much as 27 % lower than them (and that too from State Boards often renowned for their defective examination systems and poor policing of examinations, not to speak of poor teaching and training) are entitled to apply for IISER admission. This injustice and immersion in a cruel Baboo Theater of the Absurd will embitter and make cynical some of our most talented students. How can they accept such manifestly distorted equivalences -when they are in the very throes of forming the self images that are to sustain and drive them in the long process of their scientific formation – without becoming cynical and embittered as so many Indian generations before them ? Is this not typical of the very means and ways in which the Indian Science system and society reinforces and reinstates it’s own mediocrity and injustice?

The implications for our society of this novel method of social engineering are also not trivial. Science is supposed to be based on objectivity and merit . The bureaucrats of the DST dreamt up inclusion in the top 1% of any of the 29 Board results (which is calculated irrespective of subject choice so that it may not include even a single science candidate !) as a criterion for award of DST-INSPIRE scholarship. By some far fetched social engineering principle this may seem justified. However the IISERs have adopted these same cutoffs with their enormous variations as a basis for excluding some the best and most talented students in the country from even applying for admission to IISERs while welcoming laughably inferior levels of preparation as candidates. Can this ever lead to the IISERs training crops of talented and productive scientists drawn from our best talent ?

In an earlier era 10% preferences and quotas applied in the professional educational system at large led to large scale riots and the souring of the minds of whole generations . In the present instance it is “only pure science” education that is at stake . Most of the brightest students do not even consider such a choice since it will lead to a frustrated life in our mediocrity and influence peddling dominated scientific system. The hope was that the IISERs would somehow bring quality Science education with impartial evaluation of merit and attract talented students to science to power India’s development into a Knowledge Society. Many were cynical and said it would be the same mediocrity generalizing and rewarding itself . It could well be that they will be proved right. Perversion of reason and truth and manifest injustice are not good classmates for brilliant scientists in search of natural truth.

Table 1 : http://www.iiser-admissions.in/marks/ gives the following cutoffs.
Board Class 10 % Class 12 % Andhra Pradesh 91.10 82.30 Assam 77.60 73.40 Bihar 73.20 73.40 CBSE 93.60 92.40 Chhattisgarh 82.50 85.00 Goa 85.80 81.80 Gujarat 86.40 77.80 Haryana 87.00 82.60 Himachal Pradesh 76.30 79.40 ICSE 95.60 93.30 Jammu & Kashmir 84.40 79.20 Jharkhand 78.40 67.20 Karnataka 89.60 88.00 Kerala 93.90 91.80 Madhya Pradesh 85.80 82.60 Maharashtra 80.10 83.80 Manipur 77.00 75.80 Meghalaya 70.50 70.60 Mizoram 86.60 68.20 Nagaland 68.10 73.00 Orissa 81.30 76.10 Punjab 81.30 76.70 Rajasthan 79.10 82.40 Tamil Nadu 90.40 94.50 Tripura 68.80 68.80 Uttar Pradesh 72.50 72.60 Uttarakhand 70.40 68.20 Viswa-Bharathi 93.40 95.80 West Bengal 86.60 82.20 This list is taken from the website
http://www.inspire-dst.gov.in/Inspire-Advertisement.pdf
(2007 class X and 2009 class XII) cut off Table 1. For SC/ST Candidates, the cut-off's for
X and XII will be 10% lower for all of the above entries,
e.g. CBSE Cut-off will be (83.60%) for X and 82.40% for XII.
Similarly, cut-off for OBC Candidate will be 5% lower i.e.
for CBSE (88.60%) for X and (87.40%) for