SUPER 30 TO SUPER 50 BY ANAND KUMAR(BIHAR)

Mathematician Anand Kumar, who is well known for his Super 30 programme, will now step out of Patna and conduct written exams in other Hindi speaking states. Super 30 selects meritorious but poor students and prepares them for IIT-JEE exams, and this year the number of students to be selected has been increased to 50.

Speaking at the India Today Aspire Education Summit 2012 in Delhi last week, Anand said, "Due to the success of Super 30 programme, there was demand from various quarters to increase the intake of students and so it was decided that we would select more students through written exam to be conducted in April 2012 across 10 centres in the Hindi belt."

Every year Super 30 selects 30 extremely talented students who come from financially poor families but aspire to get into the IITs. Anand and his colleagues coach these students free of cost and guide them. Between 2003 and 2011, Anand and his team coached 270 students of whom 234 made it to various IITs across the country.

Anand said the exam centres would be in Delhi, Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur, Muzzaffarpur (Bihar), Kanpur, Lucknow, Banaras, Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradessh) and Rewari (Haryana). Apart from these centres, Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh and four to five other exam centers are also being considered.

To take the entrance exam, students have to pay Rs.50 for the entrance exam and download the form from the Super 30 website. The students who are selected will be prepared for the 2013 IIT-JEE exam. "These students would be coached for a year at Patna in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Accommodation would also be provide free of cost to the students," Anand said.
Informing about the way the students are prepared, Anand says that every day the students take one and half hour classes in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Classes are held six days a week with 5-6 tests being conducted every month. Anand's brother Pranav and mother Jayanti Devi look after the boarding and food for the students.

Anand and his colleagues coach other students in the evening to fund the Super 30 programme.

The world has acknowledged the success of Super 30. Anand's education model has been praised world over with Time ranking it among the top educational institutions of Asia.

Anand gives credit for the success to his students, "It is the students who put in the effort; most of the students study for 14 hours every day, therefore they should be credited for their success," he says.

Anand, who is now preparing his students for International Olympiads, says he wants to open schools that provide free education if state governments are willing to give land at concessional rates.

Attending schools and Getting into IIT

It has been a myth that bunking from the schools for getting prepared for the iit-jee will assure your selection but from this new plan published in my last post that 'IIT WILL INCLUDE 40% BOARD MARKS IN IT'S SELECTION CRITERIA' ,It will be necessary for the students to attend their schools properly.


NEW DELHI: Performing well in school will become more important for IIT aspirants from 2013. It's almost decided now that at least 40% weightage will be given to class XII marks for admission to the 15 IITs as well as other engineering institutes in the country.

No wonder schools are elated. Calling it a step in the right direction, principals say the new policy will make sure that science students preparing for engineering entrance exams in class XII attend classes and focus equally on their Board exams. The move is also aimed at curbing the business of coaching centres which simply 'equip' candidates to crack competitive exams caring little for concept-based teaching.

"It's a right step as now students will focus more on school. Many children in classes XI and XII skip classes to go for coaching. Or they often have long classes after which they do not attend school to do self-study. The coaching institutes only equip students to crack an exam. Parents' money also gets wasted in the process as not all can get through," said L V Sehgal, principal, Bal Bharati School, Ganga Ram Hospital Marg.

D R Saini, principal, DPS R K Puram, added, "Education should be wholesome. But these days some schools have come up which tie up with coaching institutes. These schools just charge fees for enrolment without the need to attend classes. They, instead, let students spend their time preparing for competitive exams at coaching centres. The new admission policy for IITs will put a stop to that practice. Besides school performance, the candidates will be evaluated through a common aptitude test in place of JEE and AIEEE. According to D V Khakhar, director, IIT-Bombay, a single test will also help get rid of the multiplicity of entrance exams. "Students, who have done well in school, are welcome in IITs. It's time coaching centres were regulated."

The Joint Admission Board of IITs will take a final decision on the policy at its February 18 meeting, however, coaching centres say they will not be out of business. "We train students for competitive exams. We will absorb the changes introduced in the entrance test and adapt ourselves to new training methodology. Besides, we make sure our students focus on school," said Ajay Antony, course director, TIME. K Gopal, director, Narayana Institute, added, "With school performance being considered, students will have to perform much better in class XII Boards too. They can't score in the nineties without special assistance. That's where we come in. Not just for competitive exams, students need coaching institutes for doing well in the Boards too."

Aspirants have their own concerns. Shekhar Chaudhry, a class XI student from Janakpuri, who travels to Ber Sarai for IIT coaching every day, said, "Many like me have already enrolled in a two-year programme to prepare for IIT-JEE. Such a change should have been introduced from 2014."

MAIN IIT-JEE PATTERN DECIDED FOR 2013

KANPUR: The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are all set to bring a whole new change in the pattern of Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) organised every year across the country. The changed exam pattern would be followed from the year 2013.

The new pattern of JEE would include conducting an aptitude test for the exam aspirants. The students will have to crack this aptitude test consisting of questions based on reasoning and all other subjects that the students have studied in their schools. But it is worth mentioning here that the aptitude test would also include questions related to subjects like physics, chemistry and maths.

This arrangement has been proposed in the IIT Council meeting held in Delhi on September 14 with an aim to reduce the pressure on the students.

Talking to journalists, IIT-Kanpur director Sanjay Govind Dhande said that the aim is to respect every subject that a student has studied be it history, geography or any other subject. He said that this is possible only by conducting an aptitude test which will have both qualitative and quantitive reasoning questions to solve for the students.

Dhande said it was discussed during the IIT Council meeting that instead of calculating the performance of the students on the basis of percentages received in their class XII, the weightage must be given to the percentile.

He also mentioned that it is an extremely tough task to bring about a uniformity in the percentages achieved by the students in their class XII results as the percentage achieved by a student in one state board varies from the percentage achieved by other student in some other state board. For bringing this uniformity, the percentages of students would be converted into percentiles and this would be used for further comparisons among the students.

"As different states have different boards and there are only two Central boards - CBSE and ICSE, it will be a difficult task to establish a uniformity in the percentages achieved by an individual student when comparing his performance with the other individuals. For this, the percentage of marks achieved by the students would be converted into a percentile. This would be done through virtual mapping by Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata", said Dhande while explaining about the proposed way through which the percentages achieved by students in class XII in their different state boards would be brought at a uniform scale.

He further said that the 50% weightage would be given to this percentile performance and other 50% weightage would be given to the performance in the JEE. It would be on the basis of these two performances that the students' ranks in the JEE would be assessed.

Dhande also added that there are 42 state boards and because of this reason, some kind of uniformity has to be established to match the performance of the individual students (in their class XII) with each other. And when so many boards are there and each one of them has its importance, the percentile match is the only way out to calculate the student's performance.

Dhande said that these recommendations have been given by Ramaswamy committee to the ministry of human resource and development but at this stage, the plan has not been approved by the government.

He added that as soon as the notification for the same will come, the changes would be made in the pattern of JEE.