Is Factual = Actual?
The annual survey on Engineering Colleges done by India Today has been giving consistently low factual ranks to IIT Bombay. Aishwarya, Antariksh and Harish investigate.
The Ranking Story
It’s a known fact – even though all the IITs are equal, some are more equal than the others. Every year, news magazines such as India Today and
Outlook dedicate an issue to quantify these differences, by ranking the IITs as well as other government-aided colleges based on varied indices of performance. Every year, it’s the same old story, as the IITs occupy the top spots, nearly always accompanied by a cycling of ranks among them. There are two parameters of performance – a perceptual performance and a factual performance.
Colleges are scored perceptually based on how a panel of experts from various levels of academia “perceives” or views each of them, which closely approximates the general public’s viewpoint. A factual score, used by India Today to counterweigh the effect of a perceptual score, is calculated using statistical data for parameters such as Student Caliber, Placements, Faculty and Infrastructure.
Disturbingly enough, what’s become some sort of a yearly trend is IIT-B’s poor factual rank, falling from 15th last year, to 21st in 2008. A term like a “factual rank” would seem to be a more credible means of evaluation and comparison, since the name itself suggests that it’s based on reliable facts and figures. This very thought instigated us to dig deeper, so that by analyzing the data retrieved, we as students knew where we could focus our efforts. This seemed especially pertinent, because there existed a very wide gap between our Perceptual (2nd) and Factual Ranks (21st).
Do these rankings even matter?
These rankings are usually met with a mixed set of reactions, as blogs worldwide yell out in exuberance, or are filled with pages of skepticism. Students often dismiss them as incomplete and irrelevant, as they fail to capture the “true picture” of an IIT, defined by how vibrant the student life is, and how much of an all-round development is possible. Is a factual rank something we have to take seriously, given that no one else does – not the recruiters, and not the new entrants filling IIT-B as their first choice during counseling? Heck, even India Today gives a 70:30 weightage to a perceptual rank over a factual one!
However, our motivation lay not in dismissing these rankings altogether, but in getting whatever information we could, and taking some affirmative action. For example, a thought which made our opinion towards a factual rank more ambivalent, was that it may be possible that the overall placements figures might not be in IIT-B’s favor, since what we hear about are only the highest pay packages. Even though the top JEE rankers fill each department in IIT-B, their performance as undergrads may have slipped dramatically, leading to a lower average grade point vis-à-vis other IITs. Although, what really got us going was seeing how low our factual rank was compared to some non-IITs. (see box.)
What we endeavored to do
By official protocol, the survey team (in this case, AC Nielsen–ORG-MARG) must approach the Public Relations Officer (PRO) first, which then forwards their questionnaire to the appropriate authorities in the Institute, such as the Placement Cell. The PRO then returns the completed form, keeping a copy for future reference. We attempted to obtain this information by contacting the PRO, to both check for possible fallacies, as well as see where and by how much we as an Institute were lagging. Here, we were told that the form had asked for several rather specific figures, for example, the total number of Pentium 3 workstations used for academic purposes across departments, the total Internet Bandwidth etc. At the time of survey, IIT-B did not have a full-time PRO, and such statistics not being easily available off-hand, the PR Office had written back suggesting that the survey team procure the relevant data from the different sections of the administration themselves.
An official mail was then sent from the Administration section saying that IIT-B wouldn't be able to submit the filled survey form due to various pre-occupations of the people involved. Essentially, no data was ratified or sent by the PRO, and from where India Today got its data, and on what basis we’re ranked this low, is not known at present. In an attempt to salvage the situation, our team had sent an email to India Today’s editorial board, routing it via the PRO, asking them to explain and elaborate on the factual rank parameters which are open to different interpretations. We’d also asked for the data that had been collected for IIT-B, as well as an IIT with a much higher factual rank, to facilitate comparison. This matter is now being actively pursued by the current PRO, Mrs. Jaya Joshi, who feels as strongly about it as we do.
Implications and Impact
An investigation of this sort revealed to us one of many possible loopholes in the flow of information from the concerned authorities at IIT-B, to where it’s published finally. Tomorrow, it could be some newspaper clipping carrying unverified data, and we’d be none the wiser. What’s worse is that these magazines are usually tight-lipped about their sources, and would need some serious convincing to reveal them. Plus, the PRO now has no stored records to show, leaving us completely in the dark. If not at the top position, we’d at least like our college to be represented on the basis of correct data. This isn’t to take away credit from the other colleges, and their rankings can only mean that engineering students everywhere in India are performing better.
Whether people take these rankings seriously or not, we hope that by bringing this matter to light, the interaction of IITB with the media in the future would be handled with greater care, and with due attention being paid to the information collected and stored. We, as students, would be glad to help.
(Aishwarya Sharma and Antariksh Bothale are third year and second year students of the Mechanical Engineering Departments, while Harishchandra Ramadas is a second year student of the Physics Department. They can be contacted at bonny.sharma@iitb.ac.in, antariksh.bothale@iitb.ac.in and harishchandra@iitb.ac.in)