Reports of mass copying during school and college examinations in several states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are common. But a blog post by a computer science professor indicates that students at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, and other engineering colleges, indulge in it too.

Earlier this month, Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi, wrote a blog post on the quality of the country’s information technology engineers, which corporate recruiters also seem to be concerned about.

In the post titled, CS education is poor because of copying, Sanghi referred to a statement by Srinivas Kandula, chief executive of information technology major Capgemeni India, at a business event in Mumbai earlier this month.

At the event, Kandula said: “I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them (IT recruits) are just not trainable.”

Sanghi attributed this to alleged copying in engineering institutions across the country. The professor, who has also taught at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, wrote that information technology and computer science students in India are falling behind because they have not learnt much in engineering college.

He wrote, “I have always been amazed at the Indian software industry. That it can grow so fast and become so big despite the absolutely abysmal quality of education in our colleges…

“A lot of people have talked about poor quality curriculum, poor quality faculty, poor infrastructure, poor school education, and so on. I disagree. There is a much simpler explanation for this: Copying in our colleges, besides laziness.”

Sanghi said, “In many colleges, even in some of the IITs but to a lesser extent, students either copy the code for a programme from the net, or one student writes it, and the others copy. The code is tested in the laboratory. If it runs – and it does – the student is awarded marks even if the lines are not original.” He added that these shortcuts are adopted as early as the first semester.

His blog post received many approving responses on social media.

Sanghi added that one reason for such laziness is that a large section of students do not join the engineering sector after they graduate. “They plan on studying management,” he said. “Their lack of skill is never discovered because they do not join the sector.”

Sanghi said that he had always suspected that students were not applying their minds in engineering college. He said that his suspicions were confirmed when he once accessed Graduate Aptitude Test for Engineering data through which admission into post-graduate programmes of the IITs is regulated.

“About a decade ago, I had set the paper for the test and data for previous years had been shared with me,” said Sanghi. “The median score for the previous year was zero. Basically, I can train a five-year-old to do better than 50% of the applicants and all he has to do is submit a blank paper.”

In his blog post, he recounted that he was recently part of a selection committee to recruit programmers for a government department. He found that most applicants he interviewed, including those who had “several years of experience in industry”, could not perform a variety of tasks they ought to have learnt at engineering college. “These (were) all the programmes we ask our first semester students who have never programmed before,” he wrote.

(Click here for Android APP of IBTN. You can follow us on facebook and Twitter)

Share This News

About sharing