Cause the old people forget(profs?) what it was to be young

CAUSE THE OLD PEOPLE FORGET WHAT IT WAS TO BE YOUNG 

"A dive into the idiosyncrasy of great learned men which you will encounter in IIT Guwahati and maybe every other engineering college of india. "

"The quality of students coming to IIT at B tech level is decreasing day by day" . "You guys think you are smart? You just know how to tick options, and that's why you are here." "Success at JEE is overrated, it is just some option ticking and guessing which lands you ranks". "Your fundamentals are weak, you have been spoon fed by coaching".
These are some of the several enraging remarks you may hear after coming to IIT from your respected professors. Very rarely you will be congratulated for your hard work of 2/3 years after entering the hallowed portals of this institute. There are very few professors who can keep their ego aside and truly appreciate the ingenuity of a student, these days with the commercialisation of education, the number has been further reduced and IITs are no exception. Somehow the battered and stupid system of education is producing intellects who cannot handle their ego, their snobbishness or narcissism.

JEE is a tough exam for an average individual. It's not about the toughness of the questions or the vastness of the syllabus, but the process which makes you a successful aspirant. You go through a varied amount of emotions, changes and experiences during your preparation. Some of you can relate to the experience of being far away from home for the first time in your life, for a single dream called IIT. Your 15/16 year old self which steps out from the threshold of your house is your childhood which will never come back, you sacrifice it to defeat 1 million other competitors in a battle called JEE advanced. Even for those remaining back at  the comfort of your home, it isn't easy, cause your mind seems to be always on a rack. The tension, the pressure, the expectations behind the comforting smile of your parents, the nagging of the society, the competition of peers, and what not. For most of us it is a period of penance which  we  voluntarily  take up to prove ourselves. There are ups and downs, some days you are about to give up, some days are bad enough to make you cry when tests go poor. All of this happens at the prime time of our teenage, when we are ourselves struggling with our puberty, when mood swings are common and rage and anxiety are all stuffed up in our veins. Finally, when after all the hard work, you come home after giving JEE advanced, deep down you know you might have screwed up but you are going to IIT. After all this, you come here and someone shouts that you don't know anything and JEE is just an option guessing affair. We all know after hearing this , how much respect we can offer the person  at the back of our minds. Some of us can go back to tracing the gynecology of the speaker.

People will say we must not dwell in the past, or rest back comfortably on the laurels of the past. Agreed. We do not expect us to be welcomed like Kings, we are students and we know we are here for learning (and anyway after tasting the mess food, we can guess how royally we will be treated for next 4 years), but then no one has the right to treat us like a piece of shit and assume that our concepts are zero and we have entered here by sheer luck. IITs spend so much money to arrange for counselors for its students, but that is never gonna help much. IITs should counsel first the professors on how to treat us. If they treat us well, depression/anxiety etc etc will automatically recede among students. But guess what most of them have forgotten how it was to be young, how vulnerable they themselves were at the very onset of their college lives, during their own entrance exams. I agree, getting a rank in JEE isn't as hard as contributing significantly in discovering original ideas during research, and there are greater things occupying the mind of professors (academical and administrative), but they must accept that had they sat for the same exam in their youth, they might not have succeeded. It is easy to be in class 10 and mock the easiness of your class 5 books, even though you might not have been a topper back in class 5.

A BIG QUESTION : HAS THE JEE BECOME EASY SINCE 2006, AFTER THE EXAM PATTERN WAS CHANGED?

FACT : JEE IS PRIMARILY AN ELIMINATION EXAM.

If somehow it has become easy, then it is easy for everyone, since ranks , not the scores which determine your entry. Having said that, it is my personal belief, JEE advanced (known as IIT-JEE formerly ) has no way become easier after the subjective pattern was done away with. Every 3,4 years the difficulty of the paper increases by a significant amount, some of the old questions become known results, and more difficult questions are framed on same.

Proving pythagoras theorem was hard in 700 B.C. So calculating the length of side of a right angled triangle would be an ordeal if two of the sides were known, but now even a 12 year old can work it out. If someone looks at the 1951 paper of IMO , or early papers of any international or national exam,, he would find the questions of trivial nature in those papers. After every decade, the collective IQ of any community rises, JEE papers too have gone through a major transition since 2000.  What has changed since 2000, is that people these days have more resources, people can afford better aids, so the collective performance has risen, and so has risen the competition with the entry of online/offline coaching.

In 1600 A.D warriors use to use primarily, bows and arrows as weapons in a war. It was fine then, since everyone had more or less same options, but imagine winning a war with bows and arrows, if your opponent had a machine gun. This is the reason why coaching has become a necessity, it gives you an extra edge. Still, you can clear the exam without it too, but it will take more effort and more time.

BIG PICTURE:

Maybe my small brain isn't qualified enough to see the ingenious motives of the professors in IITs, maybe I am no one to judge them when they insult the whole batch of freshers coming to the college by calling them victors of a rat race. Maybe we really are rats, we know how to run, and that's what we keep doing. If this is the case, then what is the duty of a good teacher? They should help us to rise from the shadows of ignorance to an era of enlightenment. Enlighten us, change us, help us to learn in a better way. For one whole year grading must be stopped, and focus should only be on pure learning and not on grades or marks. The quality of teaching must be improved, so as to get students interested in the subject matter. Maybe we the students of B-Tech are not their prime focus, as we are here to crack placements, and fulfill the usual Indian middle class dream, the key to a good life-a high paying job and stability. Maybe something is wrong somewhere.... and we must speculate and try to correct it... till then nothing will change, kids will turn lecture halls into bed rooms and that back bencher kid will dive into the deepest ocean and climb the highest mountain in his dreams as the professor continues with his typical dora the explorer  monologue.