[alex_smart]

>Do we have any figures (anecdotal or otherwise) of how many students in the top rankings have had coaching?

I would say 90%. Probably even higher. That's also because pretty much anyone who is serious about taking the exam gets some coaching. However, I know at least a few people that cracked JEE without any coaching. Even a guy who got rank 1 without coaching (Piyush Srivastava).

> I am of the opinion that the JEE (and every other competitive exam: AIIMS, etc) should be much much harder, and designed with a specific eye to defeat coaching

I am not sure how making the exam harder would defeat coaching. The value of the hard problems is that it helps you distinguish better between the very top of the top students. At least at my time there were always a number of such problems thrown in for that purpose.

I also don't quite understand what you hope to achieve here. The whole "coaching centers teach you tricks to solve problems" idea is way exaggerated. (Honest to God, I have a terrible memory and I actually derived half the formulae I needed during the exam itself.) There are many other ways in which coaching centers add value. The most important of which being that you surround yourself with and compete against other talented, motivated students.

[valarauko]

The goal isn't for the exam to be hard for the sake of being hard: it's to increase the discriminative power of the exam, increasing the gap between the top student and the bottom student to be selected. The fact that 13 students this year have the top score tells me the test cannot meaningfully discriminate between them, and that is likely true of raw score as well - probably hundreds or thousands of students share the same raw score, with the need to break ties. We're talking about a total point score spread of 375 to pick ~ 50K students, and that's not even including the requirements for minimum qualifying scores. If 13 students are able to get the same raw score, and still can't be meaningfully separated based on the established tie breaking criteria (presumably even more students got the same raw score but could be assigned a lower percentile based on tie breaking), then the issue is likely many magnitudes larger at lower raw scores where the distribution is much more crowded. I'm advocating a system where perhaps 10 points separates even the students at the very top. Of course, this system has its own problems, but that's besides the point: no system is perfect, and I think its still better than the current system.

Sure, the very top students are likely to be both talented & hard working, and would perhaps have still gotten on the list without coaching (though perhaps not high enough to have their pick). It's in the minutiae of small differences in raw scores where the benefits of coaching likely help. If coaching gives me an additional 10 points, that could mean the difference between getting a seat vs not for a bright student.

I think you're suggesting that joining a coaching centre is a strong signal of seriousness, rather than a material benefit from the actual classes. Possible, but as others in this subthread have pointed out, access to coaching is something out of reach for many students, irregardless of their seriousness. To pose the question another way: how many of the 50K people who got a seat would not if coaching (in its current form) did not exist? Perhaps the top 100 names would be redistributed within the top 5000, but they'd still have a seat. There's likely a lot more students in the long tail whose fortunes were determined by access to coaching. My concern is less with the top 100 and more with students at the precarious end.

[alex_smart]

Raw scores! (Btw what are the un-raw scores called? cooked?!)

13 students getting top scores!!

My God, it has been a while since I wrote the exam, has the situation changed that much since then? At my time, there was a 25 marks difference between the top two ranks.

Is there any chance you are talking about JEE Mains and not the JEE Advanced? JEE Mains is supposed to be the easier test that serves as a "prelims" to the more difficult Advanced exam. For Mains itself, it is not all that important to distinguish between the top students.

>I think you're suggesting that joining a coaching centre is a strong signal of seriousness, rather than a material benefit from the actual classes

I am also suggesting that there are other benefits from joining coaching that are probably more important than the much hyped "tricks" for solving problems. For one, joining a coaching class means that you are part of a community of other students with similar goals and aptitude.

Otherwise, I agree with your overall argument (although not in its entirety). Yes, at the lower end of the ladder, small difference in scores can result in big jumps in ranks and yes, coaching would definitely have a significant impact on the prospects of these students.

The point I do not agree with is lack of access to coaching. Even middle class families of Bihar, the poorest state of India, find the resources to send their kid to Kota for a couple of years. So, it is not that inaccessible. Plus there is apparently free material available on youtube now, created by the IITs itself.

I would also argue that people much below this threshold have bigger worries in life. We as a society definitely need to ask ourselves why it is not possible to have a dignified, livable wage for the majority of people in our country when many other countries seem to have solved this problem. Solving such hard socio-economic problems is a ridiculous expectation from a measly entrance exam.

[valarauko]

I was talking about the JEE Mains, because that's the only score the majority of students will be able to use for all the other (non-IIT) colleges. Even if we consider the Advanced, the difference between the top two ranks was only 6 points, and the top 8 were within the 25 point spread that separated the top two in your year (I'm using 2019 for a non pandemic perturbed year). The top 10 were separated by an average of less than 4 points each.

> Even middle class families of Bihar, the poorest state of India, find the resources to send their kid to Kota for a couple of years. So, it is not that inaccessible.

I wonder, though. Quora answers about the cost of coaching in Kota from 2018 yields figures in the range of 2.6 - 3.3 lakhs annually (ie, coaching + accommodation + food, etc). That's a median additional expenditure of 25K per month, for two years. Yes, some families from Bihar are able to muster up the amount, but I suspect there is some survivorship bias here. Even if Kota were to be filled by Bihari students, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is accessible to the average bright motivated Bihari student. My guess it is not.

> I would also argue that people much below this threshold have bigger worries in life.

No argument there.

[alex_smart]

>Yes, some families from Bihar are able to muster up the amount

Not "some". It is literally lakhs of families every year. And if you look at the data of total number of JEE candidates from Bihar, that is actually a very significant percentage.

Even if you believe that coaching is not accessible to the average bright motivated Bihari student, the very fact that so many people from the poorest, most backward part of the country look at this exam as an instrument to better their lives should tell you something.

[valarauko]

> Not "some". It is literally lakhs of families every year. And if you look at the data of total number of JEE candidates from Bihar, that is actually a very significant percentage.

Across all the coaching centres in Kota, you have about ~ 150K students annually, so about 1.5 lakhs in total from all states. Even if the overwhelming majority were Bihari, it doesn't generalize. That's tells us more about the network effect operating in Bihar rather than something about dedicated students in general. That's a lot of kids for a tiny town like Kota, but a drop in the ocean when dealing with the scale of the JEE.

> the very fact that so many people from the poorest, most backward part of the country look at this exam as an instrument to better their lives should tell you something.

Yes, that the exam needs reform. The fact that so many students who 'succeed' at the exams benefited from enrolling in coaching classes suggests that the exam needs to be reformulated to eliminate that variable. It's not the only thing in the education system that needs reform, but it is one among many. If as you suggest serious students benefit from the community of other like minded kids, then self organizing study groups can happen and still save 25K/month.

According to me, the goal of the JEE is to identify ~ 10K kids with the right combination of aptitude & dedication, in a manner that's not blind to their wide ranging social & economic backgrounds. Attending a coaching centre is a signal for their family's desire, but I think we can find much better signals for aptitude & dedication.

[random314]

> the very fact that so many people from the poorest, most backward part of the country

You keep repeating this misdirection everywhere. Students studying in Kota from the poorest and most backward states are not themselves from poor and backward families. India has tremendous wealth inequality as does Bihar. If they were, they wouldn't be able to afford 2 years of coaching and lodging in Kota.