I am currently teaching a short course at a leading Business school in India.
It would be reasonable to assume that most of the students who are enrolled here have worked hard for their admission. Admissions criteria in recent years have been exceedingly stringent, requiring top class academic performance at Secondary School, Higher Secondary and at Undergraduate levels.
With the Right to Information Act, people can ask what admissions criteria were used for granting admissions and can challenge the result if the process appears to have been circumvented. Consequently, academic institutions have had to build processes that are simpler to explain, resulting in a bigger reliance on published academic scores over other softer measures of performance that might be judged in the Interview process.
With this higher level of stringency in the admissions process, I would have expected to find the students here to be more academically driven than say MBA students of 15 years ago. Quite the contrary, I am beginning to notice a higher level of disinterest in the course material amongst the student fraternity. Other faculty members at many B-Schools share this impression.
I am cognizant of the fact that only yesterday, I wrote a piece about people who complain that they don't make 'em like they used to. I am therefore disinclined to claim that either the student body or the teaching body at B Schools are not made of the same stuff these days.
I do remain flummoxed, by how a number of students who ostensibly worked very hard to make it to an elite institution of higher learning, suddenly switch off once they have made it in.
What gives?
2 comments:
I think it has a lot to do with the kind of people who get attracted to a B-School admission these days, and their motivations. (And everything's true for the IITs as well, in my opinion)
This goes back to the "Indefinite Optimist" quadrant from that Peter Thiel book. Students don't go to school to get knowledge, but to get a brand, which can then open up options. Since there is no specific motivation to do much better than getting into the bare minimum placement-friendly top percentile of the class, it reflects in the kind of rigor they put into their work towards academic and co-curricular commitments.
The modern business school student is a hungry resume curator. How would I know without going to B School? I get to look at and talk around many B School applications.
As Shivram pointed out over an email, this part was a little cryptic, hence the lengthy explanation that follows:
"Students don't go to school to get knowledge, but to get a brand, which can then open up options. Since there is no specific motivation to do much better than getting into the bare minimum placement-friendly top percentile of the class, it reflects in the kind of rigor they put into their work towards academic and co-curricular commitments."
There are people who do things because some innate aspects of these pursuits motivate them. The best mathematicians fail everyday and might go their entire lives without a major discovery, but that doesn't stop them from doing what they love. Fame, brand and so on aren't the only things on the horizon. And then there are others.
Two friends of mine back in college come to mind (9.9 and 9.5 - their CGs). Neither one of them had any specific academic inclination. Both of them are people who can shut their minds up and go through the grind - and that's how they saw academics. One of them was a backbencher (with me) and the other one a shut-mind note-taker. But they'd cracked the code to a good job. Both of them are in Finance-related jobs today.
That's the entire thing - this bare-minimum effort to get to that level is something that's not going to make for them being great students in the classroom. These are not the kind of students you would like to teach. Heck I'd hate such students who have done the right amount of percentage play and studied well on the four nights before the four examinations in the course to ace it.
That's what I meant when I wrote that an absence of specific motivation leads to high scores on standard metrics (examinations) but abysmally low overall rigor. (Incidentally, that's also a problem I hate to see out in the corporate world)
Coming to the point of resume curators - the "best" of us are told to take up science for "good prospects". Then we study hard and go to the best schools for "good prospects". Somewhere along the way we internalize this and start planning ahead for good prospects. Quite a few people I knew back in college got into activities they had no love for simply because they would look good on the CV. So the CV became a sort of show that you had to curate for. Why? Good prospects.
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