| Volume 3 No.4 | July 2000 |
Editorial
The year was 1961. Seventeen year old Jai had just completed his higher secondary examinations with the Delhi Board. A month earlier, in February, he chanced upon an advertisement under the classified educational section of The Hindustan Times about an entrance examination which was to be held jointly for a couple of engineering colleges, called Indian Institutes of Technology. Not particularly impressed with the name, Jai went on to write the exam which had a paper each in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and English spread over two days in the first week of May. He also toyed with the idea of seeking admission to Delhi University or to Delhi College of Engineering at Kashmiri Gate. A few days later, he received a registered letter asking him to appear for an interview on a scheduled day, in the month of June for admission to an IIT. When he learnt on the day of the interview that most aspirants preferred Mechanical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, he was a bit rattled for he had opted for Chemical Engineering at IIT Kanpur on the advice of his elder brother. That was the year when JEE was held for the first time and Jai is none other than our Professor J.P.Gupta of ChE department.
Aditya appeared for JEE 2000 and failed to qualify. He was considered a good student and was among the intermediate examination toppers in Bhopal. Aditya had before him the option of joining one of the best MCA programs in the country or going to a Regional Engineering College. He, however, opted to go to Kota and get enrolled in one of the coaching outfits which have succeded in placing more than 600 of their students, this year in the list of the 3000 odd successful JEE candidates. He stays alone, away from his parents and has his meals in one of the several cafeterias, which have mushroomed to cater to more than twentyfive thousand boys and girls, who remain in Kota for a year and get coached for various pre-engineering and pre-medical tests, including JEE.
Between 1961 and 2000, if the Joint Entrance Examination has evolved into the most prestigious competitive test in the country, paradoxically, success in JEE is achieved now, by bulk of the aspirants, at effort levels much beyond those required by 10+2 examinations. It is felt by many that there has been little conscious effort to monitor the academic content of JEE. Vijay Gupta, describing JEE as - the gateway to perhaps the best in education the country has to offer, also draws attention to the distortions that have crept into the examination. His critique along with N.S.V. Kameswara Rao's debate on the efficacy of entrance examinations form the cover story of this issue of Directions.
The Institute is currently engaged in review of the UG curriculum - an exercise carried out regularly at intervals of approximately ten years. G.K.Lal , in this issue, shares his perspective on engineering curriculum design. N.S.V. Kameswara Rao provides a brief commentary on the review exercise being carried out by the Mallik Committee. UG curriculum, in many ways, has been central to the existence of IIT Kanpur. The next issue of Directions proposes to continue this discussion in greater detail. This issue also carries announcement of the Distinguished Alumnus Awards for 2000-2001, along with profiles of the awardees. Their career graphs provide the most eloquent advertisements for IIT Kanpur. Other highlights of this issue include an exposition on Advanced Ceramics by D.C. Agarwal, views on the question of creativity in design by Amit Ray, and Harshwardhan Wanare's yarn about a light pulse that travelled at a speed greater than c. Read on ....
