India's college education system is broken, and the statistics bear it out. Comparing it to the United States' -- a system that really isn't so good either -- doesn't even begin to describe how serious the problems are in it.
Industry groups complain that 90% of college graduates (75% of college engineering graduates) are completely unemployable. Not merely untrained, but not even worth training. One of the major industry training companies has recently increased their training period to a full 7 months.
Plagiarism is endemic and encouraged on every level, from the Dean down, even in graduate schools. Most students write papers by copying off the internet and citing "Google". Many "programming" students assemble programs by begging for "the codez" or otherwise copying "the codez" from existing projects. Professors rarely bat an eye when the entire class turns in the same work.
By comparison, in America, plagiarism is looked down upon and stigmatized from as early as the start of elementary school. It's still a major problem, but it's not socially expected in the same way that it's become in India.
In this kind of environment, it's not surprising that "coders" are being trained rather than "programmers". Programming is about problem-solving, and it's hard to teach problem-solving in an educational system that revolves largely around copying other peoples' work in place of solving problems.
A few of the best students manage to succeed -- after all, even a broken system can't stop some of the smartest and most motivated from succeeding. But even for them, the soul-sucking nature of such a system can hardly be encouraging, and it does no favors for their job prospects -- since being "Indian" carries the stigma of being a product of that broken system, even if you managed to become a great programmer regardless.
HN often likes to demonize traditional education, but the most important role of education is not to teach skills, but to teach you to think. That is the purpose of writing a 10-page critical analysis of a theme in a Shakespeare play, or building a toy memory allocator: not because knowing Shakespeare or being able to write malloc is important, but because it teaches students to think and analyze. By plagiarizing papers and programs, students completely miss the point of the exercise -- to learn to think!
Indian colleges are by and large failing this primary responsibility of education, and their students suffer as a result. In true cargo cult fashion, they have adopted the trappings of education without understanding the real purpose behind it.
This is one of the most articulate summations I have ever seen on the Indian education system. I agree with everything, except the last paragraph which I somewhat agree.
A large shoulder of the blame must be placed on the Indian student himself. He revels in the 'plagiarism' culture. Due the the fact that he can plagiarize almost everything, he does about one-fiftiest that someone in an undergrad CS major in an US educational institution would do. He boasts about how he is able to game the system to his family, friends and relatives. He sails through four years of a CS degree and then he gets a job as a 'coder' in one of the outsourcing firms for 5000$ a year.
The smart ones of course, do their time and then they escape to graduate school in USA where they learn in 18 months what an undergrad CS major learns in 4 years and some more. They go from brink of working on coder jobs for $5000 a year to working for bigcos like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia for $100,000+ etc. A small minority with the entrepreneurial itch usually work for a couple years, save, head to the Valley or home and start their own startups.
In some sense, it's a case of "spare the rod, spoil the child": if from a very young age, students learn that plagiarizing and cheating are allowed and expected, that's what they'll do in college too.
Schools need to be responsible for enforcing academic discipline -- and to a large extent they reap what they sow. A similar, albeit lesser-in-magnitude problem exists at many schools in the US, where teachers are pressured by administration to overlook plagiarism or give students "second chances". Unsurprisingly, when you teach that cheating is profitable, people learn to cheat.
Indian students do not learn from a young age that plagiarizing and cheating are allowed and expected. Plagiarism and cheating is taken seriously at a high school level (although I'm sure there are a couple of bad apples in the bunch) and even, ironically, at the college entrance examination level where being caught cheating will cause you to be banned for several years from taking the entrance examination.
The problem with plagiarism in college is that it goes way beyond the graduate level. Most professors will have several published papers - all plagiarized from prominent journals. They will have published several books - all rehashes of standard CS literature which they will set as course textbooks to their students to make money. In this case it is a judgmental error on the part of the students. Most of them have had a fine education up till the high school level and are now adults, and they should realize the scam in front of the eyes.
There are alternatives. In my day, there was no Khan Academy. No open courses at MIT and Stanford. No Udacity.com. No iTunes University. And of course, they always have the option of graduate school in US which doesn't burn a $100k+ hole. I am not exonerating Indian schools of their responsibilities, they are certainly broken and need to be fixed as soon as possible. But at the same time, you don't need to be an outlier to beat the broken system and avoid becoming a 'coder'. I just have this strong suspicion (which of course I have no way of verifying) that all these 'coders' would be dropping out of CS programs if they were studying in an US educational institution instead of an Indian institution.
I do not think rod alone can produce the results you want.Teachers promote plagiarism because they themselves are sub par. Teachers have enough power to use rod to control student in other area of school, college life i.e. discipline, relationship between sexes,proper dressing etc.They do use rod wherever they feel confident.
Biggest problem I have seen during my schooling days is of Guru culture. Teacher is expected to know everything so they behave as such. They are never open to discussion or criticism.
So unless teachers becomes collaborator and work for the fun of it rather than respect or guru status, I have little hope.
PS: I agree with your analysis but your solution is not agreeable.
Even the regular "Computer Science" stream is filled with incompetents. How is it that you can go through four years of education which, as you say, is supposed to teach you how to think, but can't even puzzle your way through a simple Fizz-Buzz problem?
Based on what I saw at University in the UK it goes something like this:
Plagiarism at UK universities (the good ones at least) is extremely frowned upon and the staff will happily fail you if you hand in identical coursework. In fact in many cases they will fail everyone involved without trying to figure out who did the original work.
However, in the CS dept you would get many bright students who were excellent academically but couldn't really program worth a crap.
You would also get other students who were actually decent programmers although many of them might not have been as strong academically (although many excelled at both).
This meant that a concept would be introduced in class and the bright students would easily understand the idea behind it and rush off to implement the coursework.
Of course since they couldn't program all that well they're code would be full of stuff like off-by-one errors and poor indentation/code design etc.
They would then enlist the help of other students who were good programmers who would be happy to help them (basically fix their code for them) and felt it was justified because the person seeking the help clearly understood the problem area but was just having "minor" problems with semantics etc and it was usually just a case of "oh, do your while loop like this" etc.
This meant that all students submitted different code thus no plagiarism, however it was entirely possible to pass the course without the ability to right a solid program.
I know people who graduated the course with strong programming skills but got mediocre results compared with the people who they helped.
Much detail on this is expounded on (with at least some sources) in the discussions on Wikipedia about the recently terminated India Education Program.
The IEP was much like similar programs in other countries -- the idea being to get writing Wikipedia articles as a class activity for students. In the past, similar programs have had various successes and failures, but the IEP is notorious for its sheer size and consequences. It was a total and utter failure in which around a thousand students ended up flooding Wikipedia with plagiarized content, forcing mass-reversions and auditing of the entire program, and eventually shutting it down.
Much of the problem was bad management and insufficient planning/mentoring, but there's lots of useful detail in the discussions about issues in the Indian education system, why so many students assume it's okay to copy-and-paste, and so forth. There's some good perspectives from Indian editors, particularly the "ambassadors" who were serving as liaisons for the program.
I think OP was saying that knowing Shakespeare is inherently important because it transforms your ability to think.
For example, take a case where someone knows how to think, and has read relatively easy children's authors like Enid Blyton. This person would still have learnt to think from writing a a critical analysis of whatever novel they've read.
However their ability to think is still limited to merely the thought processes of an author for children ( Disclaimer: I have no intention of belittling Enid Blyton here).
By just reading Enid Blyton you can't think in terms of metaphors or similes or puns etc. By reading Shakespeare you gain an inherent ability to think in a completely new way. This is also perhaps very similar to what PG says in ANSI Common LISP about LISP's unusual appearance, to quote PG:
' You have to think in a language to write programs in it,
and it's hard to want something you can't describe. When I first
started writing programs-- in Basic-- I didn't miss recursion,
because I didn't know there was such a thing.'
Similarly if you didn't know there was such a thing as personification, you wouldn't miss it!
I appreciate the support, but I actually believe that literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular are important enough to be studied for their own sake. We are the stewards of our cultural heritage, and it is our place to keep it going. Knowing about and thinking about books makes people better in other ways than just giving them skills and tools to apply to other problems. Good art enriches life and humanity.
And having some common points, like all studying Shakespeare, is good because it means we can all talk and think about it together.
Studying the humanities is not necessary for a person to learn to think. I didn't mean to imply that. But studying the humanities can certainly help in that direction, and should be done anyway.
I asked because from the perspective of mental self improvement it seems to me that any sufficiently intricate and well formed literature ought to do as well and I was wondering if there was any reason for it to be Shakespeare in particular.
I've never read Shakespeare and have the ability to think, so it's obviously not essential. And people thought before Shakespeare. Shakespeare had to think to be Shakespeare, after all.
I understand why people hold it up as essential: it's how they learned to think, and they can't think of another way to learn to think. So they call it "essential." It's still wrong. But understandable. Learning to think comes from having diversity in experience, not reading Shakespeare.
Industry groups complain that 90% of college graduates (75% of college engineering graduates) are completely unemployable. Not merely untrained, but not even worth training. One of the major industry training companies has recently increased their training period to a full 7 months.
Plagiarism is endemic and encouraged on every level, from the Dean down, even in graduate schools. Most students write papers by copying off the internet and citing "Google". Many "programming" students assemble programs by begging for "the codez" or otherwise copying "the codez" from existing projects. Professors rarely bat an eye when the entire class turns in the same work.
By comparison, in America, plagiarism is looked down upon and stigmatized from as early as the start of elementary school. It's still a major problem, but it's not socially expected in the same way that it's become in India.
In this kind of environment, it's not surprising that "coders" are being trained rather than "programmers". Programming is about problem-solving, and it's hard to teach problem-solving in an educational system that revolves largely around copying other peoples' work in place of solving problems.
A few of the best students manage to succeed -- after all, even a broken system can't stop some of the smartest and most motivated from succeeding. But even for them, the soul-sucking nature of such a system can hardly be encouraging, and it does no favors for their job prospects -- since being "Indian" carries the stigma of being a product of that broken system, even if you managed to become a great programmer regardless.
HN often likes to demonize traditional education, but the most important role of education is not to teach skills, but to teach you to think. That is the purpose of writing a 10-page critical analysis of a theme in a Shakespeare play, or building a toy memory allocator: not because knowing Shakespeare or being able to write malloc is important, but because it teaches students to think and analyze. By plagiarizing papers and programs, students completely miss the point of the exercise -- to learn to think!
Indian colleges are by and large failing this primary responsibility of education, and their students suffer as a result. In true cargo cult fashion, they have adopted the trappings of education without understanding the real purpose behind it.