School fee for BEST bus upsets parents

Anahita Mukherji | tnn

Mumbai: Parents of Borivli’s Don Bosco High School are up in arms against the school management for charging them 45% more on the dedicated BEST school bus service than what the undertaking itself charges.

Don Bosco is one of the schools that has subscribed to the scheme, which provides for a dedicated BEST bus for school students. BEST will charge Rs 166 a month and Rs 497 for a quarter for the bus pass, which works out to Rs 1,657 for the ten working moths of the year. However, the school is charging students Rs 2,400 for the scheme, which works out to a profit of Rs 743 per child.

Last year, the BEST rates were Rs 65 per month, which added up to a total of Rs 650 for the 10 months that students went to school. The school, however, charged students Rs 1,100.

“This is totally unfair. Not only has the school doubled the fee for the BEST bus route this year, but the fee that it has charged is also far more than what BEST itself charges,’’ said a parent.

“Another parent who accompanied me to the principal’s office said she could not afford the increase in the bus fee. She was told to discontinue the service,’’ the parent added.

Another parent who told the principal that his child would fend for himself if he missed the school bus was informed that he would still have to pay the additional amount.

When the parent said he would look at the possibility of charging the card himself, he was told that his child would not be allowed to use the dedicated bus service. “Why should I be denied the dedicated bus service when I am ready to pay the BEST what it charges?” he asked.

When this reporter spoke to Rossi D’Souza—a school staffer in charge of collecting money for the bus service and swiping the BEST smart card for the buses—he said the additional money collected by the institute was in case a student missed the bus. “If any student misses the bus, we will use the extra money to arrange for outside buses for the student,’’ said D’Souza. Parents, however, said they had never heard of this before.

D’Souza confirmed that he had heard complaints from parents over the issue. “If they don’t want the service, we can withdraw it,’’ he said. The principal was unavailable for comment.

BEST PRO A S Tamboli said he would look into the matter.

More seats give IIT aspirants higher hope for slice of success

No. Of Hopefuls Rises To Almost 4L, Seats Increase To 7,300

Hemali Chhapia I TNN

Mumbai: It was at IIT-Bombay that Nandan Nilekani learnt “the most important lessons of my life’’, a gratitude that the 1978-batch alumnus and now Infosys chief expressed with a $ 5-million donation to the institute. Years ago, when Kanwal Rekhi of IIT-B’s class of 1967 wanted to give back to his alma mater, he fought bureaucrats in the HRD ministry to alter rules and allow government institutions to accept “private donations’’. Like them, most old students look back at their years at the prestigious institutes fondly.

This Sunday, a whole new batch of aspirants will queue up to, as a parent of an IIT student said, “get in there and grab a slice of success’’, much like their illustrious predecessors.

While entry to the IITs has never been easy, competition this year will be tougher as close to 4 lakh candidates, across 131 cities (around 193 students will take the exam at a centre in Dubai), appearing for the JEE. However, the number of seats in the 15 IITs has risen to over 7,300. “Besides the two new IITs, seats will increase as the IITs will implement the second phase of 18% OBC reservation,’’ said Bhabha Sarma, chairman JEE 2009.

The rise in the number of aspirants from 3.11 lakh in 2008 to 3.95 lakh in 2009 has forced the IITs to book more exam centres. The Mumbai zone has seen the largest surge. A K Pani, a JEE 2009 chairman at IIT-B said, “This year, we have 52 new centres in this zone. Exams will also be conducted in Sawai Madhopur, which has been added to the list this year.’’

Nearly 40% of the candidates (1.55 lakh) are from the reserved category this year. To ensure that the seats for SC/STs are not left vacant, IIT directors have decided to hike the 40% relaxation in scores to 50% from 2009. This means that if the last general category student in 2008 was admitted with an overall score of 172 out of 489, the aggregate cut-off for an SC/ST student was 104 (after a 40% relaxation). If the general category cut-off in 2009 remains the same, the bar for SC/ST candidates would be lowered to 86. Subjectwise cut-offs would also be affected.

Another relief for students is that the two new IITs—in Himachal Pradesh and Indore—will start classes this year with 120 seats each, offering B Tech programmes in computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Sources said none of the six IITs started last year will increase intake or offer new courses this year. “They do not have enough faculty members. Most professors in the new institutes have been loaned out from the old IITs,’’ said an IIT-JEE chairman. This, in turn, has restricted expansion plans of the old colleges.

Moreover, as reported in TOI earlier, the IITs have also decided that the extent of relaxation for the physically-challenged candidates in JEE-2009 will be on a par with SC/ST candidates. “The decision on conducting preparatory courses for disabled students will be taken in a Joint Admission Board meeting,’’ the JEE website states.

SCORING A POINT
IIT-JEE scores are also accepted at: Benaras Hindu University (IT School); Indian School of Mines University, Dhanbad; Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram; Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Mohali, Pune, Kolkata, Bhopal, Thiruvananthapuram; Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology Society, Noida; Indian Institute of Maritime Studies (Merchant Navy), Mumbai

500 city colleges to be delinked from varsity

Hemali Chhapia | TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: The old British system of affiliating colleges to universities is in the process of being dismantled. Soon, Mumbai’s premier St Xavier’s College and all the 500-odd colleges so far affiliated to the University of Mumbai will no more be tied to the university’s apron strings. Ditto for Miranda House and other Delhi University colleges, Loyola in Chennai and Presidency in Kolkata.

Instead, colleges will now be administered by a new boss, the undergraduate board. The idea is the brainchild of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC). The sole purpose of the undergraduate board is to liberate overburdened universities from the grunt work and tedium of a college overseer, so that they can focus their time and energy on higher callings—research and postgraduate studies.

Experts use a horticultural analogy to describe the current situation—the university, which should have grown into a strong overarching oak tree nurturing an eco-system of colleges, has been reduced to deadwood. It’s time, they say, for both collegiate and university education to bloom.

How Will Students & Institutes Benefit?

The proposed undergraduate board will meet the educational needs of the diverse and growing number of school leavers.

The move will free the parent university to focus on research and post-graduate studies. It will facilitate the entry of new colleges and their affiliation for examinations

The new board will prescribe the conditions of examination, conduct them and also prescribe and update courses

Affiliation an outdated idea: Knowledge panel

Mumbai: The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) proposal for more leeway to parent universities by delinking them from affiliated colleges has gone down surprisingly smoothly, with several states already developing a draft bill and others considering the proposal. Among the states to have responded positively are Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan and the Union Territory of Puducherry in the south. The lack of opposition would seem to indicate that universities are carrying far too much on their tired shoulders.

The undergraduate board will function like the ICSE or CBSE board and will execute all the responsibilities, academic and administrative, that a university owes to its flock of colleges—curriculum, exams, degrees and finance.

The knowledge commission, which has long called for a division of duties, says that Indian varsities are “no longer able to function efficiently due to immense centralisation and politicisation’’. The commission’s document states, “This system of affiliated colleges for undergraduate education, which may have been appropriate 50 years ago, is neither adequate nor appropriate at this point of time. Quality and excellence are compromised in the effort to meet the needs of one and all. The result often is that everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator and fails to meet special needs or the aspirations of bright students.’’

The NKC, instituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and headed by Sam Pitroda, recently completed its tenure and is now working with 26 states and three Union territories to reconfigure education systems. NKC advisors—including S Reghunathan, former Delhi chief secretary, Kiran Datar, former principal of Miranda House, Kumud Bansal, former Union secretary, elementary education, C N S Nair, bureaucrat and economist—have criss-crossed the country to hold meetings and assess the state of university education.

Hoping to make iPhone toys as a full-time job

Jenna Wortham

Is there a good way to nail down a steady income in this economy? Try writing a successful program for the iPhone.

Last August, Ethan Nicholas and his wife, Nicole, were having trouble making their mortgage payments. Medical bills from the birth of their younger son were piling up. After learning that his employer, Sun Microsystems, was suspending employee bonuses for the year, Nicholas considered looking for a new job and putting their house in Wake Forest, NC, on the market.

Then he remembered reading about the guy who had made a quarter-million dollars in a hurry by writing a video game called Trism for the iPhone. “I figured if I could even make a fraction of that, we’d be able to make ends meet,” he said.

Nicholas, 30, had never built a game in Objective-C, the coding language of the iPhone. So he searched the internet for tips and used them to figure out the iPhone software development kit that Apple puts out.

Nicholas decided to write an artillery game. He sketched out some graphics and bought inexpensive stock photos and audio files. For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night”. After finishing the project, Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on October. 19.

On the first day itself, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically “dancing in the street,” he said.

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99.

To people who know a thing or two about computer code, stories like his are as tantalizing as full of promise. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: The Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and fresh inventory keeps arriving daily. For every iShoot, which earned Nicholas $800,000 in five months, “there are hundreds or thousands who put all their efforts into creating something, and it just gets ignored in the store,” said Erica Sadun, a programmer and the author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.

The rush to stake a claim on the iPhone is a lot like what happened in Silicon Valley in the early dot-com era, said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who oversees the iFund, a $100 million investment pot reserved for iPhone applications. “It’s still early days for mobile development, but those days are coming.” NYT NEWS SERVICE

IDEATING: Vassilis Samolis (left), Kostas Eleftheriou and Bill Rappos (right) wrote a program called iSteam, which fogs up the face of an iPhone like a bathroom mirror. They made $100,000 from the program

IITs won’t fix blunders in JEE papers

Despite IIT-B Prof Finding Mistakes In ’08 Maths Section, Board Fails To Act On Advice

Manoj Mitta | TNN

New Delhi: RTI applications of a computer science professor from IIT Kharagpur, Rajeev Kumar, might have forced a change in the procedure to determine cut-off marks in the JEE due to be held on April 12, but the administrators have remained silent on another serious deficiency pointed out by a mathematics professor from IIT Bombay, K D Joshi.

On the basis of the model answer sheet that was made public after the 2008 exam, Joshi wrote to the JEE administrators in August, saying there were five major mistakes in the maths section which could have cost a candidate 18 marks even if he had solved those problems correctly.

Since the model answersheet was disclosed after the admission process for 2008 had concluded, the administrators did nothing on Joshi’s shocking disclosure as a difference of each mark could have dramatically changed the ranks of the candidates and the options that would have been available to them in terms of branches and institutes.

If a candidate lost 18 out of 161 marks for no fault of his, the wrong evaluation of those questions seems all the more unfair considering that the cut-off in maths in JEE 2008, as reported earlier in TOI, was no more than five marks and that somebody with just 10 marks in that subject could get admission into IIT Kharagpur.

Though the Joint Admission Board of JEE 2009 discussed Joshi’s correspondence, as disclosed to TOI by its chairman Gautam Baruah, its information brochure gave no indication whether the model answersheet would be made public at least this time immediately after the exam so that any mistakes that are there could be corrected even before the damage is done with the announcement of results.

Consider the five blunders in the maths papers of JEE 2008 exposed by Joshi, one of the senior faculty members of the IIT system:

Question 7 of Paper 1: The accompanying instruction indicated that out of the four given choices, one or more could be correct and that the candidate would be given four marks for the complete correct answer or zero for an incomplete one. While the model answersheet said the complete correct answer was options B and D, Joshi discovered from his calculations that the correct answer was only D.

Question 23 of Paper 1: The instruction on the question paper said “only one” out of the four given choices was correct. This turned out to be misleading as the model sheet conceded that there were actually three correct answers. So, if a candidate rightly chose more than one correct option, the examiner was obliged not only to give him no marks but also penalize him by deducting one mark.

Question 7 of Paper 2: Though the model answer was given as option A, Joshi found that the “complete correct answer” was missing from the four given choices. Since the question itself had a mistake, a candidate after doing his calculations might have avoided answering it lest he attracted negative marking for a wrong answer.

Question 17 of Paper 2: Joshi found that due to omission of plus/minus sign, the officially correct option was not the “complete solution.”

Question 21 of Paper 2: The official answer was that Statement A in Column I matched with Statement R in Column II. With detailed calculations and drawings, Joshi showed that there was actually no match for Statement A in the other column. The candidate who figured that out would have however lost three marks.

Ad case: IIT-B to take legal action against coaching class

Anahita Mukherji | TNN

Mumbai: IIT-Bombay officially announced on Saturday that it would initiate legal proceedings against IITian’s Pace, a coaching class that trains students for the IIT entrance test.

TOI reported over a week ago that Pace had placed an advertisement in a newspaper with a photograph of the IIT-B dean along with a note from him praising the coaching class after having sent his son there. The aggrieved dean said he had written the note as feedback for the coaching class in his capacity as a parent and not as dean. He was upset that it was used in an ad for the coaching class.

“IIT-Bombay wrote a letter to Pace, asking for all mention of IIT-Bombay to be removed
from the class’s publicity material,’’ IIT-B PRO Jaya Joshi said.

However, on Friday, the coaching class once again published a newspaper ad stating that the IIT director, dean as well as 30 IIT professors sent their children to the centre, following which IIT announced legal proceedings against Pace.

“The advertisements mention IIT-B’s name without any consent from the institute. The institute had also issued a letter informing Pace to forthwith stop the use of IIT-B’s name in the ads. The advertisement published on April 3 is in spite of the earlier intimation,’’ the statement issued by IIT said.

Pace MD Praveen Tyagi, however, felt that if the IIT-B dean, director and professors sent their children to Pace, it was something parents ought to know while selecting a coaching class.

IIT-B director Devang Khakhar said, “What is published in the ad is true. But where we send our children for coaching is a personal matter and the IIT is no way connected. We do not endorse any coaching class.’’