Getting Into India's MIT

ASEE Prism, Nov 2006 by Grose, Thomas K

INDIAN INSTITUTES OF TECHNOLOGY

THE SEVEN SCHOOLS that comprise the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are notoriously difficult to get into. IIT is considered the MIT of India, and it sets its standards extremely high. Each year, around 230,000 students take the entrance exam, and only 5,000 are accepted. And, as BusinessWeek noted in a recent article, many of those students come from middle-class families and have paid for extra tutoring. But the article also highlighted a special, tiny school in Patna, in one of the country's poorest regions. The Ramanujan School, created three years ago by two local math mavens, each year accepts 30 smart but low-income students, gives them free lessons and housing and tutors them in math. The result: 16 of the first class of 30 got into IIT; 22 of last year's did; and this year, it expects all 30 will make the grade. Santosh Kumar, 19, who comes from an impoverished farming family, told the magazine that when he learned about the Ramanujan School, he rushed over to apply. He whizzed its entrance exam, then spent seven months studying hard. It worked. Kumar came in 3,537 out of 5,000 and earned a place at the IIT in Kharagpur.-TG