Viral Video: Australian professors react to IIT entrance exam papers

Commenting on the difficulty of the exam, chemist Dr James Hutchison wittily remarked, “I’d probably, you know, leave the exam room crying if I was in year 12 and I had to do this. Yeah, good luck, good luck.”

When asked whether the exam prepares IIT aspirants for the future, Computer scientist Udaya Parampalli said, “Definitely this will set up basically like a background, a baseline so you could imagine that all the IIT students who would have come, they would have firmed up the fundamentals.”

But is the examination an ideal method of selection?

Mathematician Barry Hughes said that he “believes that using the exam the way it’s used isn’t selecting very bright students for the engineering colleges”.

He pointed out there was the “ugly question of coaching and unequal access to resources.”

“We all know that in any educational system if you go to a good school, well resourced, with the best teachers and so on like that, you expect a better outcome. That’s ultimately the main justification for spending money on education as a society, that if you work harder at it you produce better results. But with these race-against-the-clock-style examinations, there’s a trade-off between the student’s ability in the subject, natural intelligence, and their having been trained to deal with examinations of this type,” he said.

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