What’s missing in IIM chemistry?

I don’t claim that I had it in me to pip Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for the top-most honour in Science, if the Nobel Prize is that, but for some ifs and buts of life. But the way the chemistry lecturer went about it in college, resulted in turning me off completely from chemistry as a subject of academic pursuit in later years, that I didn’t even get to enter the race with him.

FLAWED METHOD

This is how it happened. The lecturer was teaching atomic theory. It was one of those initial lessons that had to be learnt before delving deeper into such things as oxygen, other elements to be found on this planet, chemical reactions that happen between them, and so on.

That meant explaining to students what an atom was in the first place, and this was how he did it:

Take a large piece of iron. Break it up into two. Repeat the process till you can break it up no further.

But up to that point, he had me going with him completely. I mean, without the benefit of any special teaching, all of us had an instinctive understanding that in atomic theory, we deal with tiny specks of stuff that exist on this earth (if you don’t want to split hairs about molecules and atoms and stuff like that).

But he lost me completely, when after claiming that one reaches a point when the stuff can be broken up no further into two parts, he went on to say that if you break that up further, you will find beneath, such ‘sexy’ (not his words, mine) stuff as nucleus, electron, and proton, and so on.

The contradiction, so apparent to my simple mind, between the last two points — that of reaching a stage when you can break it no further and then saying in the same breath that ‘if you break it further…’ — didn’t seem to register in him. I could have stopped him then and there and quizzed him on it. But that meant formulating the question in the mind in Tamil and translating it into English to a point where you felt confident enough about having got the syntax right.

It was also a large class of 100-odd students and I was a shrinking violet — and have been ever since. Consequently, all the stuff about atomic numbers, periodic table, Mendeleev’s hypothesis and, indeed, the entire edifice of collegiate chemistry went over the head.

BIZARRE PROCESS

If we see the education system as a process, then what happens is that it takes the student raw material, let us say, worth 100 units, and works on it to produce an output of only 80 units.

The innovations in the education system, especially those dealing with evaluating performance in recent years, have only made it worse. It has spawned a number of teaching shops, or not to put too fine a point on it, factories actually, that have mushroomed by simply gaming the examination system. So much so, places such as Kota in Rajasthan or Namakkal in Tamil Nadu have become bywords for factories producing something that is not education, but grotesquely distorted versions of it.

They have gamed the whole process that practically guarantees an outstanding score in the plus-two exam and success in joint entrance exam for engineering or medical course admissions.

Indeed, if they were to apply for a geographical identification tag for their offerings such as ‘Kota System’ or ‘Namakkal Model’ just as vineyards in Champagne, France, have done for their wine or farmers in Ratnagiri have done for their ‘Alfonso’ variety of mangoes, they might well get such registration.

‘INPUT-OUTPUT ANALYSIS’

These ramblings have been prompted by a small news item about global ranking of management schools and how Harvard continues to lord it over all other institutions as the first choice destination for employers across the world.

Fair enough, but except for a small detail. Judged purely by aptitude for management functions, students entering IIMs in Ahmedabad or Bangalore outscore their counterparts entering more prestigious business schools in Harvard, London or Yale by a comfortable margin.

Yet, they don’t figure in the top 10 of business schools, though to be fair, they don’t make up the bottom pile either.

Here is what the Quacquarelli-Symonds (a reputed institution for ranking academic institutions) has to say in its latest report (QS Global 200 Business Schools report 2012): “India’s IIM Ahmadebad is notable for the extraordinarily high average GMAT scores (a measure of their aptitude for managerial tasks) of its students, with its figure of 767 exceeded only by fellow Indian institution IIM Bangalore (780).

This places the two ahead of any North American or European school for the academic quality of their student intake.”

I must add that students entering Harvard, Wharton, INSEAD and London Business Schools have inferior scores).

The report also points out with admiration that they have demonstrated their flair for managerial tasks despite possessing very limited work experience.

‘‘The fact that students enrolled at both schools have an average of just two years of professional experience underlines the tendency for academically gifted students to move quickly on to the MBA qualification at the outset of their careers, rather than using it to up-skill at mid career, as is more common in Europe and North America’’, it notes.

Have IIMs and other business schools done to our management students what higher secondary education system has done to aspiring students of engineering and medicine?

Are they taking students of a certain calibre superior to those entering the portals of a more prestigious institution in the West and converting them into end-products that somehow do not measure up in the eyes of a prospective employer?

The average student entering the management education system in India can spot far more quickly than anyone else that business is being managed poorly if profits go down from say, Rs 100 to 90. He has that superior quantitative reasoning ability.

He can, by one look at a pie-chart, say whether market share is growing or not (graphic data interpretation ability).

He is equally more felicitous than his counterparts elsewhere to read and comprehend written material, reason and evaluate arguments or subject a written material to a critical evaluation for its logical consistency than those entering such institutions as Harvard and Columbia.

I can go on and on. The sum and substance of my argument is this. The average Indian business school student enters the portals of management education with an advantage that is unmatched to peers in the US or continental Europe. Yet, when it comes to choosing managers for top jobs employers look no further than Harvard, Yale, INSEAD (Paris) or London.

On the other hand, it could well be that employers in the US and Europe (which account for the bulk of recruitments from the top Business Schools) value a Harvard qualification as inherently superior to anything else going around, out of a sense of blind cultural prejudice, even though far more superior talent is available in India.

That perhaps explains why the West finds itself in the economic mess that it is in today. They simply didn’t pick enough Indian talent. Either that, or our management institutions are engaged in a value-destructive process and not an accretive one. You decide.

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