Voicing his displeasure over the quality of engineers that pass out of the IITs, Infosys chairman emeritus, Mr N.R. Narayana Murthy, has said there is a need to overhaul the selection criteria for students seeking admission to the prestigious technology institutions.

Addressing a gathering of hundreds of former IITians at the Pan-IIT summit here, Mr Murthy said the quality of students entering Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has deteriorated over the years due to the coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants.

He said the majority of the students fare poorly at jobs and global institutions of higher education. “Thanks to the coaching classes today, the quality of students entering IITs has gone lower and lower,” Mr Murthy said, receiving a thundering applause from his audience.

He said apart from the top 20 per cent of students who crack the tough IIT entrance examination and can “stand among the best anywhere in the world”, quality of the remaining 80 per cent of students leave much to be desired.

Coaching classes teach aspirants limited sets of problems, out of which a few are asked in the examinations. “They somehow get through the joint entrance examination. But their performance in IITs, at jobs or when they come for higher education in institutes in the US is not as good as it used to be. “This has to be corrected. A new method of selection of students to IITs has to be arrived at.”

Drawing a road map to put IITs among the top engineering institutes in the world, Mr Murthy said it has to be ensured that IITs “transcend from being just teaching institutions to reasonably good research institutes” at par with Harvard and MIT in the next 10-20 years.

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