This is the season of PhD admissions. A lot of Indian institutes are conducting
interviews for their PhD as well as Integrated PhD programmes and I regularly meet
exhausted colleagues at the lunch table discussing how many students they have
met since morning.
I have often wondered about the method of selecting
candidates at Indian institutes. As a
new faculty member in 2010, I naively believed that we should also follow a system similar to North American universities: rate candidates “in a wholesome manner” by the NET/NBHM scores,
university exam scores, statement of purpose and reference letters. As is now obvious to me, there are at least three
problems with this:
1)
We all know how reliable university exam scores
are.
2)
The concept of writing an SOP confuses most students,
(who don’t get adequate guidance from their college/university
professors.) At IISER Kolkata, we used
to ask students to submit a write up about their mathematical interests. Most students would end up writing this at
the reception in a very shaky handwriting while waiting for their interview
call. The others, who had written the
statement at home, simply copied passages from famous books of G.H. Hardy, Paul
Halmos etc.
3)
Reference letters also did not usually
help. Sometimes, we got very weak students
with glowing reference letters. On a
couple of occasions, we had some students who answered a lot of questions very
well, but had poor letters! In some
cases, the college lecturers thought reference letters were character
certificates! [Note: writing reference
letters is a bit of a hassle because even in the age of email, most of our
institutes (including the elite ones) do not accept letters online and ask
students to get letters from their referees in signed and sealed envelopes.]
In the given circumstances, interview seems to be the most
suitable option in choosing candidates. The
reference letters and the SOP that the student brings along hardly play any
role in the selection process and even the mark sheets are sought purely for
official purposes.
I have the following concerns about the interview procedure:
a)
A lot of students get nervous and anxious during
interviews. They need a little more time
to open up and feel comfortable. Come to
think of it: a nervous student enters a room full of stern-looking faculty
members [1](the number could be anything between 4 and 8!) who hand him a chalk
and ask him to start solving questions on the board. There’s a good chance that this student is
writing on a board for the first time.
The student may have difficulty understanding what a member is asking or
may not be able to answer a particular question. This makes him or her more nervous and as the
rest of panel (with the best of intentions) starts giving hints to this student,
the student loses the ability to focus on the problem and think straight. Often, a friendly and more experienced
faculty member is able to make the student feel comfortable. At IISER Kolkata, we once had a student who
suddenly started panicking and sweating.
One of the interviewers made him relax for a bit and asked him about his
favourite actor. This student brightened
up as soon as the discussion veered to Shah Rukh Khan. Next thing we knew, he was back on his feet
and performed very well in the rest of the interview. So, this problem is mitigated to some extent
by friendly faculty members who can question students without intimidating them.
b)
Because of the above reason, some students
require more time than the others. So,
it is difficult to stick to the same time period for all students. But, there is an administrative issue that
interviewing a student for x minutes and another one for x+10 minutes could
potentially lead to questioning from students (or their parents!) and even RTI
enquiries!!
c)
In order for an interview to be effective, the
questions have to be well thought out. Sometimes
panel members can ask questions which may be too hard or inappropriate for the
interview. Answering such questions may
not necessarily reflect the abilities one is looking for. I once heard of an incident in which a
faculty member asked the student to state and prove a highly nontrivial
theorem. The student was unable to do so.
When others discreetly told this member that
this question might be too hard, he staged a walkout in front of a nonplussed
student. On one occasion, when I was in
a panel and was asking a simple question about convergence of sequences,
another interviewer openly snubbed me and insisted that we ask “real” questions
(which in his worldview meant questions about solving differential equations!) As you can imagine, I had to exercise extreme
self-restraint to not retort [2]. Interviews cannot possibly be of any use if
they turn into pedantic discussions (or wars) among faculty about what is
important and what is not.
Perhaps these problems are not very serious and can be
avoided if faculty with a serious interest in the quality of PhD students come
together and design the interview procedure properly. If a sufficient number of faculty members volunteer,
the interview panel can be carefully chosen to reflect all the foundational
areas that the student needs to be tested on.
I recently heard of an interesting initiative at IISER
Bhopal. They organized a workshop for a
couple of weeks in which students attended lectures on topics that were well
represented in the Mathematics group there. This workshop was followed by interviewing
interested participants for the Integrated PhD programme. This not only introduced the students to the
research specialties of the group, but also enabled them to interact with the
faculty and feel comfortable during the interview. This helped IISERB to
attract some strong and interested students in this programme.
Questions for blogosphere: do you think fine tuning the
interview procedure would be a good way of selecting students? Or do you have
other ideas?
[2] Even though I don’t dispute the importance of solving differential equations.
6 comments:
I don't think interview is necessary. GATE score, GRE score, or even CAT score, papers published, institute of last degree (if Masters is from an IIX), reference letters, or a combination of these can be used to pick candidates and the interview can be occasionally skipped.
I was at an unfortunate end of this process.
I did my masters from an IIX, and applied for PhD in the same institute. I couldn't answer some questions in the interview, and I was denied admission.
My reaction at that time was, they won't get a better motivated and talented person than someone with a masters degree from the same institution. Luckily I managed to get admitted to a top US school and now have finished my PhD from here.
My view is that the selection process should be flexible and admission should be given to a fraction of students based on there profile, and when profile creates doubts, interview them.
When India is going the US way in grant writing, tenure, research, etc, for faculty career, why not follow it for the students as well. If it works for faculty, it should work for students as well.
--MKG
@MKG
"When India is going the US way in grant writing, tenure, research, etc, for faculty career, why not follow it for the students as well. If it works for faculty, it should work for students as well. "
In principle, you are right. It should percolate down to the students. It will just take a few years before the US model becomes practicable at the student level.
With IIX students, you are likely right and the interview can be done away with. But the PhD programs at the IIXs have to cater also to students from elsewhere. Unfortunately, research culture in India is not well developed outside IIXs (with few exceptions like Panjab University) and we cannot depend upon
reference letters and exam scores for decisions.
Now one could make a specific rule exempting PhD applicants from IIX from interviews, but you see why this would really look bad.
What I am about to say next is based on a very rough average and in no way pertains to any specific individuals so please take it in that spirit:
You have done the right thing by going to the US for your PhD. I believe that the PhD programs at IIX are mostly built to cater to students who haven't had the opportunity to do their undergrad at an IIX. Sadly, most faculty at Indian Institutions are not world class and IIX students at the moment are better off going abroad for their PhDs (and hopefully coming back as faculty to India).
The only place in India that I know of which can provide guaranteed world class training is TIFR Math. I have no idea about other subjects.
My point is that the wheels of research can only start turning one at a time, not all at once. We need to get world class faculty at IIXs, who will train "national class faculty" to fill up our other institutes in India who can then fan out across the country with the ability to spot gifted undergraduates everywhere.
Its exactly the same way in the US too.. the top 5 schools train the faculty for the next 20 best schools and these faculty train those who work at the next 50 best schools and so on.
And when all the wheels are turning rapidly, we can adopt the US model at all levels.
To be fair to IIX's, some do have the option of converting from Masters to PhD based on grade point average (GPA), at least IISc does. But, this is based on the model that all the other institute in the country has IIX model of undergraduate education.
I came from an engineering college where classes were rarely held, and the university curriculum did not have some advance math courses needed to succeed in IIX. Writing GATE was the only way out of that mess.
But, when I came to IIX for my masters I had classmates who had taken some of the courses we took in their undergrads, because their university followed the IIX model and they took these math courses from their maths departments, and also sat in higher classes. To be specific, I am talking about NIT and Anna University, and even IIX. My university is some university in Central India.
So, GPA is affected because of your background and the concept of relative grade. Sometimes it is too hard to recover from the debacle of your first midterm itself.
Just digressing a bit, the best way to have world class research in India, is not to pick the brightest, but to select a lot of highly motivated people who pass some criterion for being bright.
If they are not suited for a PhD, let will realize themselves and perhaps leave the program. And give them the option for leaving with an additional master's degree, for example, masters in applied math, math, statistic, etc.
The last comment was from me :)
-- MKG
"Just digressing a bit, the best way to have world class research in India, is not to pick the brightest, but to select a lot of highly motivated people who pass some criterion for being bright. "
I agree with you. As I mentioned in the post, we don't have a "research culture" in most Indian Universities yet. That's why most IIX students are better off going to US schools where they can get the taste of the "do research or die" academic culture. Most faculty at IIX are engaged in fruitful research, but the "do or die" incentive system is not in place yet and students should look for the best.
In India, at many venerable colleges, we have faculty who still take pride in pulling out their several decade old handwritten notes and dictating them out to students. In fact, this was a persistent problem with multiple professors even at the IIX where I went for my undergrad. In this, some of these characters were barely distinguishable from the average government bureaucrat.
The worst was that these people seemed completely oblivious to either their own plight or that of their students. I even remember one such "professor" making fun of a productive researcher in our class for making "too many trips to Santa Barbara!" And there was nothing in the system that could punish such people nor incentivize the hard workers (fortunately this has changed somewhat).
To be fair though, most of these people were teaching "electives" that were peripheral to the main course of our study.
The key is that a lot of people in Indian academia especially at the University level, have not even realized that they should be doing research. Once they start connecting their self image to their research output, things should get better.
Panjab University is a shining example of this. Recently, Nature published figures showing that papers from PU had the highest average impact factor in India, beating out TIFR, IISc and all IIXs!
http://www.nature.com/news/india-by-the-numbers-1.17519?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews
Not related to the blog post topic, but I have to respond to the claim that PU impact factor makes it No. 1, beating out TIFR, IISc and IITs. My foot. I am writing a formal rebuttal to Nature, but the truth is that PU shows up on top of the list only because there are a handful of faculty members in the hyperauthor groups (you know, those big groups that publish papers with hundreds of authors BELLE, BABAR etc etc. I mean, last week we had one paper with 5000+ authors, what a joke). If you take out these mega author papers, PU, TIFR, IITG and IITB drop below all the others in the table (the citation impact factor drops to less than 1.0). The Nature table changes to IACS at the top, next - can't say much about taking 5 CSIR labs as one entity, then IISc, then oops, 12 CSIR labs, then IITKGP, IITM, and on.
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