What are the shortcomings in academics at IIT's?

At the outset, I apologize. I am not answering the question which is asked, but reading the answers to this question, made me answer this. I would also mention that my stance through out the answer will be pro-IIT and looking at the amazing work that has been done there rather than contradicting it and finding fallacies in the methodologies. I, for one, am not complacent, and never was. Also, when I say IIT, I mean all the top notch engineering colleges of India, including but not limited to NITs and BITS. Coming back to the question, I believe people will try to find faults in the highest rated people more often than average ones and why shouldn't they, right! You cannot find academic faults in a person who scored 50% marks in board exams or physical weaknesses in a person who cannot run even 100 mtrs at a stretch. Because to find faults, there would have been many a strengths, which people are generally not comfortable with. They start to probe and try to find weakness and adjudge mediocrity over them, at some later time in the day. We (Indians) like the concept of super-heroes but no actual super-heroes. Because if there are actual super-heroes, nah, there cannot be any! A person who is rated highest in a company, many not-so-good others will try to find the weaknesses and comment on them. Not only that, they will somehow create an atmosphere which can sustain only mediocrity and has no place for brilliant individuals, and that is done by comparisons. People will question Aamir Khan's Satyamev Jayate more, and try to identify why will someone do a show like this, and conclude he is probably a glory-hunter and playfully watch and discuss MTV Roadies, forgetting all their virtuous ideas they had, just a minute back. Over-hype the institution, because of the reasons that please you. Then use it as you wish. It's like, Mahendra Singh Dhoni is brilliant, but so is Virat Kohli, and so is Gautam Gambhir. I don't see any point in appreciating Mahendra Singh Dhoni, and did you look at Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist, Graeme Smith? Mahendra Singh Dhoni is nothing compared to Graeme Smith. I hope the analogy is clear enough. Darn it, India created Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India created Rahul Dravid. They learnt cricket in India. They are world-class, how difficult is to accept that. Sure, there are better others, but there are a billion not-so-good others also. I would emphasize again, its not about complacency, its about hating mediocrity. Even an average brilliant person is better than a brilliant average person. People who compare IITs with Harvards and the Stanfords don't realize that those institutions have been standing there for more than 120 years and mind you, their perils were never broken like ours. They didn't face a square zero. They began with resources. India began at square zero (and this is absolute zero) only 60 years back. Jawahar Lal Nehru created the concept of brilliant institutions, focusing on eugenics and how they will form more than a significant part in India's growth down the line. What IITs have achieved is strictly phenomenal by any measure. They have given the world a reason to look at India. You remove the IITians from the Infosys' and wipros, the HCLs and Micromaxs and the TATAs and Reliances of India, these companies won't be able to sustain themselves, and if not IITs, then same thing will have to be created by some other name so as to keep them running. India still bets on its technology sector. We all know how good our medical services are, or law practices are. Not that I am questioning the development or growth rate in these sectors, but I am saying that we should be willing to accept that even if the father (indian government & people) is not-so-good, they still have produced a fantastic brain child (iit's, nit's, bits and all top colleges). I remember a time, not more than 10 years back, when there was nothing but respect for IITs, in India, and especially abroad. I have been on two separate internships to very well respected universities abroad, and understood the fact that even today, professors abroad know two things about India, the Taj Mahal and IITs. Sure there must be some contributions, right! So, what happened in the last 10 years? Did the quality of students go drastically low? Did the quality of professors go abysmal? Are Indian students mentally challenged? Is financial stability the problem? Or is the issue something entirely different, imperceptible to the general masses who do nothing but provide their unsolicited and amateur opinions. True, we haven't produced Ramanujans and Aryabhattas, as much was expected out of us. But let me give you my complete assurance, we are working far harder towards it than the general public knows. PS : I think democracy also doesn't do very well here. Giving everyone a right to speak, and understanding that the average awareness quotient of Indians wouldn't be too pretty a number to look at, we will have more bad opinions than good ones. Also keeping in mind, the kind of intellect I have seen at Quora and particularly from the Indian contributors, I have been baffled and filled with awe, to say the least. I think Indians are just beginning to show their capabilities and claim that not only we form an integral part of the world, we can make the rest of the world depend on us and our skill sets. Also, regarding the comparison between Hari and Raj in one of the up-voted answers, there are one trillion mistakes/misunderstandings/fallacies coming in to play. Compare apples with apples, you cannot compare an Institute who is willing to teach only the brightest students against an Institute who lures bright students based on its resources. The former Institute is developing leaders from an economy which is developing, the latter institute has enough to offer.

As IIT Delhi's director puts it- Students are only known for what they do - before they come to IIT, and after they graduate from here.

the shortcoming that i have in mind are common to the whole academic spectrum not just the premiere institutes. Their is a big disconnect between what students think and what professor think. Let me start from the prof's perspective. because really its more of an HR problem. now think about it. you are trapped in this mindless job where you have to repeatedly shout and "teach" the same old shit over and over again to a bunch of faceless crowd of students with whom you are basically too afraid to make any human connection , because you are constraint by the unwritten rules of the society to not to talk to any other living soul unless their is a reason. the same reason why no one talks on an elevator, no one talks on a subway (metro), etc.. But You have to entertain them, you have to give answer to what they ask because its you "JOB". You are paid to share your "ideas" and the "organization" and "order" that you have created in your mind, your whole life. These ideas about how to understand a certain thing , like how to understand lorentz transformation in a multiple dimensional vector space, now you developed this very specific understanding and a very specific way to approach in order to resolve any fluctuations in this understanding, you developed this probably when you were a kid yourself, when you were in college and were studying this stuff for the first time. at the time you thought that you have created something you did, you understood something in a deep way and applied that understanding to resolve a lot of things that came through, thus developed more and more confidence with your approach to understand that particular thing. At the time you were so excited to tell it to someone else to discuss with them and basically make them understand what you understood. at the time you never thought that some day people will want to give you money for telling thus understanding, which you were so eager to give anyway. you never wanted anything in return but an intelligent discussion and an intelligent response. but what have you done you are now in this job where you let others to pay money to make you tell this thing to all those moron who dont even care what you have to say, let alone giving an intelligent response or an intelligent discussion back to you. You have made yourself fall in this trap where it has become your "duty" to share and expose your ideas to a bunch of nitwits who are basically buying it from you with hard cash and then throwing it away. Please dont do that to yourself. if you want to teach do it on your own terms. it may not even have to make sense. you can ask a kid to hop through a ring of fire if you want to know what i know, if you want to think what i think. it must be on your terms. Dont fall for the so called ways of the society where you are driven to sell your ideas in return of money. thats just pathetic and a complete disgrace to your intelligence. So yes their is a BIG disconnect from the profs to students. of course their are some profs who just love to to teach the same thing again and again. personally i could never do it. and those profs also have a strong enough psych to ignore the fact that they are hired to teach. They have a much better grasp of things in terms of how things are and how it should be and how i am going to treat it cause it makes sense to me. Anyways,... i think i dont need to explain the student's perspective on it. they are also trapped because of similar reasons. they dont feel intellectually rewarded when they do understand a very obscure phenomenon in its entirety. They are also forced to measure their understanding via an inherently flawed system of exams. In which they dont get to create anything new and intellectually rewarding from their understanding but rather fill in holes of someone else's (Profs) understanding by first of all simulating their understanding in their own brain, which is like the core definition of fascism. You are forced to have a view of world according to someone else. and then they will judge you on a scale about how well did you do it and if you are not good enough according to me then you are fucked. Of course what i am saying here and the way i am framing is a little too extreme but i think that is the subconscious, that is screaming with this same language but we are just not able to hear it. We already have so much better options. record the video lectures one time and make them available for all of them. then you are free from all those repetitions. Go ahead and talk to students like a person and wait for them to ask you very specific questions about resolving to have a better understanding of a certain thing. Give them enough time to make something new from their understanding. Stop trying to control their mind, stop trying to make them learn which they dont want to right now. let them build something from scratch and learn their way through.

You have asked shortcomings with respect to academics, so these are a few shortcomings in the academic part of IIT system according to me. More emphasis on theoretical knowledge: It is a sad fact that all the academic time is spent trying to find ways of solving equations and numericals, or else trying to find more mind boggling numericals than those given in the last exams. This is not really very conducive to academic environment if one does not learn the subject, but how to solve problems in that subject area. This is one of the major shortcomings on the academics in IITs. Practicals are done with little innovation or margin for change: Even if the students have some genuine idea for changing the parameter of a particular experiment, it is seldom carried out in practice by the lab technicians or encouraged by the professor. Compulsory attendance: This never works out, and creates a rebellious attitude in students, proxy attendances and in general poor morale. The teacher should be engaging, if one has to get up at 7:30 in the morning to listen to uninteresting theoretical drivel and is COMPELLED to do so, pardon me if I fall asleep in the back. Rat-race attitude of students: This is a facet not much explored and maybe not very important but people will actively fight for gaining brownie points with professors who have a cozy corner for students who score higher. I have had batch-mates who have come up to me to congratulate me profusely saying " wow! That is so awesome!" when I had gotten a 70 out of a 100, when they themselves got something in the high 90s. Dis-ingenuity and mocking? Perhaps. But it does affect the minds of the not too strong and promotes panicking and tempers running high during exams. They were more than a couple of people who were an absolute displeasure to talk to during exams. Note copying: It is a fact, there is always one person who takes the best notes in class and people (including myself, countless times) just photocopy these in the end. It is a shortcoming in the way that it promotes laziness and doesn't educate you in the skill of taking notes, but... well. Same old shit, different day : Some of the matter taught at IITs has become hopelessly outdated, and the professors insist on continuing to teach it. Lack of interdisciplinary avenues: While this  differs from place to place and department to department, I am aware of certain departments that absolutely did not allow any collaboration with other departments for their M.Tech/B.Tech Thesis or Project work. No mixing with the Research  junta: This is an in-built unsaid race system that one does not hang around with the people who came in the system through a different exam than yours (JEE, GATE, JAM, etc). This does little to foster growth of academics through collaboration of technical knowledge and innovative thinking. As far as what was envisioned for the institutes, that has been pretty much achieved. IITs were supposed to be bastions for engineering knowledge and resources, they have pretty much done that job superbly, and pumped higly capable engineers who have made their presence felt not only in India but also overseas ( some would say especially so). Now, if one is trying to remodel these institutions into pioneers of research, that is going to take some time.

I am in my final year at IIT Roorkee . So, I think I have seen enough of IIT life to answer this question. Also this answer would be more biased towards environment in our IIT. Don't correlate with other IITs as all are not the same. Pre-IIT life Every person works hard practicing for IITJEE . There is no mugging up involved and those who do don't probably crack it. So , every IITian is filled with enthusiasm as to what IIT would be like . Then everybody is like picturing himself as a scientist in the stream he has chosen , at CERN doing weird proton collisions and feel that will be really cool. "I want to do that , they would allow me to do experiments I like." Inside IIT revelations As soon as you move into IIT, you start making plans like you will study hard and become the greatest scientist . You will play sports just to refresh your mind . When you are distributed the time table during registration, you see that you have lectures from 9 to 6 and say "we have worked harder , this is nothing" . On the first day of lectures ,you wake up early in the morning take a bath ,get dressed ,eat breakfast and rush to the lecture hall in your bicycles feeling professors ,like Dr. H.C. VERMA would be waiting for you to start teaching you the theory of relativity or the string theory. But what underlies behind the big name of IIT curriculum is a pile of 7 mindless and absurd subjects with more weird professors. Professors aren't cool as you might think .Older professors are the pain in the ass when it comes to attendance; you can't really argue with them on anything, they get offended easily ; simply not cool. I am personally against this teaching common crap in the first year which we will never use in the future . The professors don't have their concepts clear . This is pretty clear when you will see a electrical professor unable to apply Kirchoff rule on a simple rc-circuit . And havoc will fall on you if you ask them a question they can't answer. They will start humiliating you in class, negative bias towards you in exams while examining papers. Don't get me started on exams. They will prepare their solutions and check your answer based on them. Are we giving board exams? Even worse, binary marking full or zero based on ,answers,imagine that in a maths paper. When you ask them this is not the right way to check answers ,they would give a frowning look and say talk to higher authorities , this is not in my hands. When you ask the dean,he would redirect you to the director , who doesn't know how he can handle this as this so called tradition is going on for centuries apparently. Mugging up stuff? What do you think will happen when you cant understand a word the teacher is saying neither the subject interests you.You will start mugging up stuff which trust me we are bad at .I dont know why/how the girls are good at it(no offense) because if you see most high grade pointers are girls.A big salute to them !!!!. This is also the main reason people start looking for other things to interest them like sports or certain sections. Trust me when I say that the sports facilities in IITs are way better than educational facilities. Atleast all the equipments work. "The root problem" The problem is the way talent is wasted here.All the theories and no practical makes us a bad engineer . Some people find their knowledge doing extra-curricular activities.Though I agree that the basic foundation is providedt by the professors but they dont explain us how to use them and where to use them.These extra-curricular activities help us get the taste of field work as in industries but then they dont help us in academics. Worthless practicals Practical labs are not the place to apply your theory to practice but to copy/paste lab programs ,impress the M.tech students who evaluate your practicals to fetch maximum marks. How can I not mention the M.tech students who are considered to be the researchers in our IITs.While B.tech students enter IITs through prestigious JEE they enter here through the GATE which is no way near the JEE standards. M.tech students who are assigned to check the practicals don't have the basic understanding of the subject.So, how do they evaluate your practicals?They certainly know what not to check ?Suppose you are asked to create a c++ program to print "Hello World".The M.tech student will ask questions like "why didn't you include comments","run the program with test case which I will provide you and then I will match the output with my answer which in no way can be wrong","why havent you taken input from a file","why havent you given the output to a file","why have you hardcoded the input";they will not ask you the algorithm which you have used to solve the problem .The result is that the creator of program gets less marks than the copier . Worry about placements and Internships Let me be honest about this. Its like the placement stuff is not the part of college curriculum. Placement cell is a whole other world . There is no synchronization at all. Every IITian wants to land internship and placement in a company of dreams.The institute part is only to call the companies for internships and placements.Rest is upto you.I dont blame them for this.But the things which we study and what is asked in interviews have a difference of infinity . So in the end,IIT is a place where  BIG companies come and hire talented people who develop their talent  without the help of the institution.The insitution just provides you a shelter for four years ,provides you resources and you prepare you for your placements.I dont think any IITian would give credit to their professors for their success in their life. We obviously worry about the placemets and the internships because thats what we are here for in the end. I can keep on talking on this topic like forever without any conclusion.This is just the tip of the iceberg.Let me know if you need any clarifications.

that a large number of departments and outdated courses are run, not because a single student is interested in them; not because they have any relevance in today's world of technology; but because those running the departments need to justify their existence. The mining, agriculture and geology departments immediately come to mind. And some unfortunate sixteen or seventeen year old kid discovers one fine day, that the penalty for not being in the top 50 percent of the top 2 percentile of students in an overpopulated country means that he/she is suddenly destined to be a "metallurgist" or "textile technologist" or whatever. I have been in the boots of that "unfortunate kid"  (for a very short while before redeeming the situation) and I know how unnerving it can be. Ultimately things worked out fine for me, but I have made it a point to go around advising people, to try leaving the country as soon as they complete their Class 12 exams. Even financial aid is much easier to get, nowadays.

The answers have covered most of the shortcomings pretty well (though I don't fully agree with all of them), but to me the biggest shortcoming in academics at IIT starts well before the education starts. The biggest problem is the seat allocation mechanism prevalent in IITs. I was well and truly baffled by the mechanism when I got selected for IIT. It is basically an auction system, and your rank in JEE is the currency you have. So everyone pretty much bids like this - Computer Science, Electronics, Mechanical, Chemical, Civil, Metallurgy etc... I did it and so does almost everyone else. This creates a herd mentality among students, and hardly anyone gives thought to what they are interested in. Students are extremely clueless about what their chosen (sic) fields are all about when they enter college life. Some fighter types put in a lot of effort to get good CGPAs in their first year so they can change their branch to a higher (sic) branch. If you are going in for a higher education, you should be passionate about what you are going to study. Otherwise what is the point? And you won't be passionate about it if you have not given any thought about selecting the field. The most people find out about their respective branches is how are the placements in that branch. Most of those who even do well in their fields in IIT, are not really passionate about them. They are just driven by their normal achiever instincts that have been honed since childhood, and many then end up doing MBAs and masters in finance etc.... I believe that rank should have nothing to do with how branches are handed out (at least directly) to students. Just like Masters applications, students should be made to write an SOP, find out about the professors in the department, and do some preliminary research about their fields (maybe read up a little). This will incentivize them to try to figure out what they like and what they don't. So a student should write an SOP to each department he/she applies to. Let them visit the departments, see the labs, see some senior students in action, see their B.Tech and M.Tech Projects etc. Then a selection committe of professors for each department should review the SOPs and decide which student to take. At this point they may use the JEE rank and marks as an input as well, but a truly passionate student will not miss a chance to study in the field he/she is passionate about. Maybe they can even interview the students who have applied. I know all this will increase the time it takes to admit students. But frankly, the current process is truly loathsome. It is high time we change this.

Agreed that there are some shortcomings in the system. We are in the real world and a utopian system does not exist. Take ANY system (educational or otherwise) big or small and one can find flaws in that. This however does not mean that these flaws can be justified. Hell no and one has to sincerely work towards eliminating them. However, at the same time we must also acknowledge the positives in the system. Coming back to the question in hand, I believe that none of the flaws are as dramatic as the answers written here. I am currently in my final year at IIT Madras and personally the academics part of the institute was absolutely fantastic. I have consistently had professors who were truly passionate about their research work and their passion have often rubbed in on us and pushed us to understand the subject more. The assignments were challenging and opened us up to more possibilities in that field. The lab assignments were extremely flexible and were complete systems implementation giving us the necessary hands on skills. One cannot blame that course is too theoretical. One needs to understand the principle behind the design. The class cannot be a mechanic workshop where students just crank in nuts and bolts and feel happy that its hands on. You need to understand why one needs to do this and from where does the particular need arise. For people who find it theory work dull and boring, engineering may not be the best way out. Engineering is not a matter of hands on trial and error alone. Infact, most of the elegance in design comes from sound and solid theoretical basis. In this regard, I find it perfectly fit that the profs teach theory in class and let us learn how to screw in the nut and bolt on our own as frankly they don't need teaching. Here is where the India assumption comes in that one needs to learn only things taught by the professors. As one of our professor put it, their objective in any class/course is to teach its fundamentals so that if at a later stage you feel you need this, then you have the basic tools to delve in this further and understand the depth. Or you can take up advanced graduate courses for specific depth. If one is interested in entrepreneurship, one can ALWAYS find ways to integrate abstract theory and practical requirement into a business. Of-course this cant be taught. But mind you professors ENCOURAGE such thinking. Almost all professors whom I interacted with lamented the lack of such  initiatives by students. The professors are more than willing to take on undergrads as an extra hand in helping with their research and other projects. My project guide repeatedly asks me to advertise about requirements for project and research openings for undergrad but is hardly met with any response. The dept organizes seminars every week where diff professors/research scholars give an overview about their work and the results and challenges and hardly 1 or 2 undergrads attend these sessions. Its in sessions like these where one can really connect classroom theory to real world problems and get a flavour of how the profs and other researchers across the world are tackling it. Students are also to blame here as the major chunk of the population really dosent give a shit about anything as they know that their dowry and job is more or less fixed. So, answering the question, the BIGGEST drawback is a lot of the students are not motivated enough to do ANYTHING. Compare this attitude with places like Stanford or MIT and you will clearly see that the undergrads there are really motivated to do something either academics, extra curriculars etc. In IITs, most of the students kill time by blaming the academic system as 'boring' and do nothing actively to engage themselves. I believe that it is the individual's responsibility to make sense of the education and use it to their skills and interests with a bit of guidance from the professors, but most of us do not want to take that effort but want to be spoon fed from professors in everything including entrepreneurship and other creative ideas.

Coming out of School education, I found IIT education lacking at various aspects. But soon i realized the fact that actually teaching at college is way different! It mainly constitutes study by self motivation and self orientation. Profs job is merely to introduce you to various aspects of the topic and your(student's) job to study about them in depth. So instead of finding short comings one jus need to absorb as much as prof can offer.