Just to balance out all the negative commentary about Indian education (which I'm not discounting by any means), I would like to offer my experience as a college student in one of India's premier engineering colleges (hint, y'all know it's name).
I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college.
Nobody in this college would dream of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc, that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common either).
I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.
And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.
Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and TA'ing :-) )
Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.
So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common case... but it and many others like it do exist.
(I'm posting from a throw-away account for reasons best left unstated.)
I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college. Nobody in this college would dream of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc, that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common either).
I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.
And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.
Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and TA'ing :-) )
Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.
So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common case... but it and many others like it do exist. (I'm posting from a throw-away account for reasons best left unstated.)