[entha_saava]

Yeah. Tier 1 colleges. Tell me more about NITs and IITs.

I study at a so colled top college. Where highest placement is always around 50-60 LPa. That doesn't mean teaching and other things are good (sure better than average, but that's not what I call 'good'). The highest placements are more because of students and a FEW professors who actually happen to be passionate.

But in the entire class, there are less than 15% of people who actually have interest in CS or Programming. Many came through good scores in entrance exams (myself included) and many through management quota (i.e Paying the institution heavy sums). While the first group has some people who like programming and CS, it also has more number of people who just happened to get good scores because of relentless studying and practice, then took CSE branch because placements.

I don't think NITs and IITs look much better these days. I attempted JEE but that was really hard to get an NIT without studying hard for 2-4 years. People who have money take coaching classes and study for JEE exclusively, but a rural student like me can't do that. The system is gamed like hell. With the abundance of such coaching kids, I don't think IITs and NITs can keep their previous charm.

Here is a paper on the Joint Entrance exam (JEE) tragedy:

https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE...

[blocked_again]

I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make. Nobody is saying all the students in top tier colleges studying CS are super passsionate into CS. Some are. A lot of them are not.

My point is that tier 1 colleges produce a lot of good programmers. The reason why they are good at programming can be because of high salary expectations, peerpressure, parents, status, passion, etc. I honestly couldn't care less as long as they do their job. The reason why companies like TCS/Infosys are bad is not because tier 1 colleges produce programmers that are not passionate about CS. It's because India has way too many Engineering colleges that is of abysmal quality. And those colleges accept students who otherwise would not have gotten into any decent engineering colleges

> Many came through good scores in entrance exams (myself included) and many through management quota (i.e Paying the institution heavy sum

I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting students. Highest package is not really what is used for defining tier A. What I meant by tier A are centrally funded colleges like IITs, NITs and really good private colleges like BITS and IIIT-H(not SRM, MIT etc). None of them take students by accepting money. If the college takes students by accepting money then it is definitely not tier A.

> The system is gamed like hell. With the abundance of such coaching kids, I don't think IITs and NITs can keep their previous charm.

Sure. The system is gamed. But it's still a fair system. The rules are same for everyone. You are measured by the number of correct answers you circle in the paper. Nobody cares about who your parents are. Nobody cares about what you wrote in your essay. Its a hard competetion. But it's a fair competetion. There is reservation at play for students from backward castes as well but lt's not get into that. Some would say it's good. Some would say it's bad.

[entha_saava]

> I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make.

That the quality of NIT and IITs are decreasing. I have seen a lot of previous generation people who studied in IITs and have stellar achievements. But I don't think the same will be true for current crop of IIT and NIT students. To be clear, I won't be judging those people who are of my own generation, but this is a disappointment about how artificial the entry to these institutions has become. How many of them will be mechanically grinding leetcode as compared to their previous generation?

Increasingly so in recent years - the year I wrote JEE mains, the paper was much more susceptible to 'tricks' and 'shortcut formulae' taught by coaching institutions, than the previous years.

At this point, I have heard IIT professors expressing discontent about the coaching center crap. I don't know how you think it is still a fair game.

> I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting students. Probably explains why your batch had a lot of CS students who were not any good.

Fine, what defines tier A? I also mentioned lot of them with high state-level entrance exam scores are not "Good Enough", too.

In what I have seen, those people who do well in exams solely due to peer pressure and high expectations, don't very well understand the concepts. I have seen so many such book-worm topper kids not properly understanding recursion or algorithm complexity.