A tale of two rankings Part-1

The Two rankings, one by India Today and another by DQ has brought out the hidden debaters in all of us. It's good to debate but introspection is also something we need to do after reading such rankings. India today ranked us the lower so lets see it's criterion and what it means for us.

Reputation: We rank 15 when comes to the reputation of the college. This is a weird and ambiguous parameter. So i'm not really bothered about this.

Curriculum: We rank 14 when it comes to curriculum. Honestly this is a bit harsh. However we do have some issues with the curriculum. HSSM's though necessary are not being conducted well. And some of the open electives are in my opinion totally abstract. Form this year forth PCO's will not be available either. Our curriculum was designed to be flexible to encourage maximum learning. But sadly course selection is driven by grades and not by learning or interests. So people end up skipping a lot of good courses in their B.Tech.

Faculty: We rank 14th in Faculty. Ok, now the India today guys must have been smoking crack when they thought of this one! For the sake of being critical the ECE faculty on the whole is not as good as the CSE faculty. As for CSE we still lack good faculty for certain core courses like OS and SE. But that apart i think we have some of the best faculty in the country.

Student care: We rank 13. Now this parameter is slightly ambiguous. I really dont understand what it means. Im guessing it roughly means campus life. Well to be honest campus life has been improving on certain fronts but seems to be going down on others. We seem to have more frequent events like carnivals and this years felicity had better student participation then previous editions. But I dont think inter batch relations are as good as they were when i joined the college.

Admission Procedure: We rank 14th which is really absolutely amazing! If I ever meet anybody form India Today i'll give him or for that matter anybody a 1000 bucks if he/she can justify this ranking. How can IIIT-A which takes people from the same exam and starts admission when we are about to close be ranked above us by 5 places! This is the joke of the century

Infrastructure: We rank 13th here. This is one place where I tend to agree with our ranking to some extent. Leave aside our WLAN and lets compare ourselves with other colleges. Just some time ago I read a post by somebody with pics of lizards/rats/insects etc. First and second year people live two in a room which i think is really too much by any stretch of imagination. The mess is too expensive and the food is generally not upto the mark. The canteen is ok but you cant eat there for any extended period of time. To be honest apart from the gym and the TT tables there isint a single piece of remotely decent sporting infrastructure in the campus. Considering this is a residential college that is really bad. And this has been the case for a decade now. As for computers, the institute can surely provide us with better and more computers. However by making laptops compulsory they have solved this problem and created another. The LAN both wired and wireless need a serious overhaul. This can go on and on..

Placement: We rank 15 th when it comes to placements. DQ rates us 5th. I was rather shocked when i read GAG Jaydev's mail which said somthing that despite placement not being a priority for the college we are still 5th. @Dr.Sanghal Dear sir, people aren't coming here attracted to research prospects. They come here because the placements have been decent up untill now. For a 12th class kid going to join a B.tech program research is a meaningless word. The sooner the administration comes to terms with this fact of life the better for all concerned!

The rankings were done in two parts. The data for all the above parameters was collected independently(75% weightage) and from the college as well(25% weightage) The data collected form the colleges directly was called factual data. If collages were to ranked based on what data they provided to India today IIIT would be ranked 24th among the top 25 collages listed. This means that Mr.Placement officer/Brand Manager royally screwed up. When I first saw that statistic I felt like venting my anger at him by torturing him like a prisoner of war only to later realise that it's useless to expect something from him.