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Interesting question!Also because I believe I am in a reasonably good position to answer it. I did my B. Tech. from IITK and was enrolled for M.Tech. at IITD where I was in a UG hostel, thus having interactions with UG students as well.My son is now in IITD and I’ve been interacting with him and his friends. It puts me in a position to also compare my time with the present one. I was also by the side of him while he was preparing for the JEE and can compare JEE preparations too- then and now.First the competition part.Coaching was generally not available, except a few metros like Bombay (now Mumbai!), Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras (or, should I say Chennai?), etc. Smaller cities like Patna, the place I am from, had some coaching institutes, mainly for state level competitions. They did enroll batches for IITJEE, as it was called then, but their claim to fame was that hardly any of their students ever entered IITs.Correspondence courses by Agrawal Classes (which I joined) and Brilliant Tutorials were the two main sources of preparation and study materials.Teaching in schools (and colleges as, in Bihar, 11-12 continued in colleges for some time) was an extremely important source of learning and preparation for the exams. Naturally, reputed schools/ colleges attracted good students and showed great results. Schools used to take pride on the success of their students in IITJEE.In DPS, R. K. Puram, for instance, sections were formed based on students’ scores in the 10th exam (CBSE later questioned this practice!), teaching in top sections was oriented towards IITJEE and good teachers were deployed in these sections to ensure better success rate in IITJEE. Best of students from all over the country with dreams of joining IITs preferred DPS, R. K. Puram. Not surprising, about 100-150 students went to IITs every year from DPS, R. K. Puram.I did 12th from Science College, Patna which used to attract best of students from Bihar. Students had the privilege of being taught by stalwarts like Asit Dasgupta, H. C. Verma, N.N. Sinha, S. C. Shaw, etc. Not surprising that Science College used to send about 40-50 students every year to IITs. Another important centre in Bihar was St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi.In short, teaching in 11-12 in school was important and was the main reason for success of students in IITJEE.The focus has now shifted to coaching institutes. Today, it is the quality of coaching, and the section in the coaching institute (one needs to be in top sections to get good teachers and do well), which is more important. Teaching in schools usually is not oriented towards JEE preparation. A student in a good/ elite school, where s/he may have to devote a lot of time on school works, may actually find it difficult to prepare for the JEE.Success rate in JEE from most of the good/elite schools is in fact very low now. Many of these schools have reoriented themselves towards SAT and international admissions which is considered an easier option if parents can afford.A JEE aspirant has many books/ coaching resources available now. So many that s/he can easily get confused. During our time, resource materials were limited. For example, Resnick & Halliday, Sears & Zeemansky and Irodov in Physics, apart from Agrawal Calsses. Life was simpler!There were only 5 IITs then. CS in IIT, Kanpur was the most preferred branch and used to close around AIR 40 and, in 1987, closed at 25. Total number of admissions was less than 1500. Approx. 150,000 students used to write the IITJEE. A ratio of 1:100.Compare the numbers now! There are 23 IITs with close to 11,000 admissions in 2017. About 1,200,000 students apply for JEE(Main). It is difficult to know the exact number of students aspiring for JEE(Advanced) as many of them do not target JEE(Advanced). My estimate would be: not more than 50% of JEE(Main) applicants target JEE(Advanced). The ratio of number of seats to number of applicants would be about 1:50 or so.Looks better than what it was 30 years back. But slightly worse (1:110) if the target is one of the 5 old IITs (which have about 5000 seats).Method of preparation is different now. Coaching institutes are more into passing on the tricks of solving a question. I notice a lack of emphasis on concepts. One teacher in a reputed coaching institute in Delhi would ask students to study the chapter themselves and he would take up only problems. In my opinion, it doesn’t work. Not even today!A teacher should focus first on developing the concepts and solve a few problems in the process. In order to maximize learning, students should be asked to attempt the problems themselves and get the assistance of teachers if they are unable to do it. Higher degree problems may then be discussed and solved in the class, to further strengthen the concepts.IITJEE included about 50% subjective questions, with step markings. These were considered better to test the concepts of students. Scores were never known but 60% was considered a very good score. 50% was usually enough to secure a place.Students now solve a large number of questions- about 200-300 every day. I have interacted with some of the top rankers of JEE(Advanced) as well as their teachers. Idea now is to practice so much that, during the exam, you get either the questions you have already done or at least similar ones. Unthinkable 30 years back! Also because of limited preparatory materials available then. One needed to be extremely lucky to get a similar question.As a result, one needs to slog a lot and examinations are very high scoring. In each subject, you can find quite a few students score 90%+. It however does not mean that IITs are getting better students now. During our silver jubilee get together at IITK, I found teachers complaining about the quality of students.Let us now come to the “Studying at IIT”.Batches were small and, therefore, the class sizes were small. Max batch size was of EE and ME- 50 each. These are now 100-120 each.Tutorials were taken by faculty members. Now, these are mostly taken by PhD scholars, especially in core years.I was surprised to see objective questions in internal exams (‘minor’) of some courses in IITD. Probably because class sizes are huge (in some courses, upto 400-450) and evaluating answer sheets with subjective questions is difficult. It was an absolute no for internal exams of IITs which focused more on test of concepts and writing skills.Classes upto 7 pm are now a part of the time-table. Back then, it was a rarity and never a part of the time-table.There is a remarkable improvement in interaction with industries. Many such sessions are organized where people from industries, and young entrepreneurs are invited to share their experiences. Students have much better exposure and a culture of entrepreneurship has set in.Quality of life in hostels has definitely gone down. Rooms are cramped, especially in old IITs. Double-seated rooms have been converted into triple-seated, and single-seated into double-seated. Oldies like me feel pained the way rooms have been converted. An extra bed with table attached and wardrobes split into two by drawing a partition either vertically or horizontally. With more students and little or no change in the number/ layout of washrooms, students at times have to skip the bath, sometimes by choice but many times due to long queue.At the same time, some of the newer IITs, like Guwahati, have facilities much better than what we got 30 years back.There is a cultural shift too. In 80s/90s, after the ragging period, a 1st year student was expected to call even a final year student by the first name. It promoted free interaction. It was also a necessity in the IIT system, as senior and junior students may enroll for the same course. Addressing a senior as “Sir” was prevalent in State level institutions (including my alma mater Patna Science College) but a strict no in IITs. Now, at least in IITD, seniors are addressed as “Sir”. Don’t know when and how this culture has seeped in.For most of the students, as well as parents, objective of getting into IITs has reduced to getting a good job. As a result, focus on studies is somewhat less. Back then, getting into IITs was a passport to go to US. For higher studies, ostensibly, but also for settling down in US, unfortunately. About 70-80 US scholarships/ admissions in a batch of about 260-270 at IITK was usual. It required greater focus on studies.With job being the main objective now, students make a conscious effort to build their CV. As a result, they focus a lot on project work, writing papers, extra-curricular activities, internships, holding positions of responsibility, participating in fest, etc.Standard of extra-curricular activities has improved. One has to really work hard for dance, music and sports events in order to win a place. During 80s/90s, extra-curriculars were just that- “extra”.On the whole, I would say life is more difficult now than then.Thanks for allowing me to reminisce.Edit: With reference to the para on assessment (and objective questions being asked now in internal exams), I would like to add that we had a few open book/ open notes exams. These were much more challenging than the normal exams. Memorising was of no use at all for such exams unless one has really understood and mastered the concepts. Books/Notes were not of much help. Learning was much better. In one course, the end sem exam was ‘take home’. We were happy when the professor announced it but soon realised that it was much more demanding and painful than the normal exams.As Vema reminded me through his comment, the biggest advantage of studying in an IIT system is that one gets to spend a few years of one’s life in a highly competitive environment in the company of some of the best and the brightest of this ocuntry. Apart from the quality of teacing/faculty/facilites, it is the single most important advantage of studying in an IIT system. The difference however has temporarily narrowed down with a large number of new IITs.

As the very name suggests in hackathon we try to use tech to hack into real world problem to solve them better. It's a 24–72 hours product making competition where every team needs to develop a product from scratch during those pretty hours. A team size can vary from 2–6 depending on the organization who is organizing it.I would like to share my first hackathon experience at HackCBS organized by SSCBS under Delhi University. Our team consisted of Me and my two friends from my University. Being a first year student it was a great opportunity to learn and meet new people. Our team name was “Bin2Byte”. We despatched from our hostel at 6:00AM and reached the college around 8:00AM.(Me in the middle)The first keynote session was to start at 9:00AM. After gathering in the auditorium with hundreds of other developers our first keynote session was with Dr. Himanshu from Adobe. He greeted all of us present there and gave a lecture on Artificial intelligence. After an hour we had a break and then attended a workshop on Jenkins & DevOps ( God knows what the instructor was teaching ). Then again after these 2 hours workshop we had a workshop on ethical hacking. It was an interactive session with the instructors. Some people were even pranked to reveal their Facebook authentication details by phishing. This workshop was great. Then we had our last keynote session on Entrepreneurship by an entrepreneur ( Co-founder of Red Carpet Technologies ). Moments after his presentation we had our hackathon theme discussion with around 600 developers.At 7:30PM we were alloted our area to work on. At 8:00PM the hackathon started. First few hours took the initial idea to develop. At 12:00AM it was the first round of idea judgement.Our idea was “Smart parking lot booking system integrated with waste management system and smart health system”. Our idea seemed healthy to the judges and appreciated us for our idea. Then came the development process. It was 2:00AM. We designed user registration forms and login forms.( Feeling sleepy )Then at 3:00AM we slept. Again waking up at 5:00AM I started coding and developing the product. It was tiresome working continuously till 2:00PM with just a half-hour break for breakfast. Still then our product was not ready and health and waste management system was not even started. We focused on UI development of our parking system to make it mobile friendly.Now came the 2nd judgement round. We were criticised by the judge for making a website. He liked our idea but told us that we should have made a mobile application instead of a website and could have integrated Google maps with it. Since we didn't knew working with Google maps API and creating an Android application we couldn't help it out. We lost our hopes of winning.At 6:00PM the results were out. The judges selected top 19 teams for re-evaluation out of more than 170 teams. We found our name wasn't present in that list. Being heavily tired and sleepy we despatched from the SSCBS, reached our hostel by 9:00PM and had a great sleep that night.I would suggest to participate in hackathons. It was my first experience and helped me to find my learning curriculum.Edit : This time after a year I participated in Hack.IT@BVP Hackathon organized by Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering and we won the 1st prize. Our team name was FrameShift.

While I certainly agree with those who think (nay, "believe" may be a better word for some tech evangelists) the new tech reading devices are more convenient, I am agnostic with respect to their essential VALUE and critical of the outsized impact of their negative aspects.Firstly, let me tell you about me, then I will give my list of pros and cons.I am a tech-savvy educator. I was always the first in my school district to implement new technologies into my teaching and lessons. Only once, when a teacher beat me to the punch in using hand-held quizzing devices, has anyone in my district ever had something before I had already been "piloting" it in my classroom (high school & college biological sciences and environmental sciences).I personally own 2 Kindles, 3 iPads, 3 versions of the iPhone, multiple Mac & PC computers (Mac much preferred) with Mac OS9, OSX, WinXp, Win7, and a couple flavors of LINUX, several "off-brand" reading/text devices that never survived in the marketplace, graphing calculators, and other gadgets that have come and gone with the tide of fashion. ThereIn the classroom:I installed my own wireless network so students could bring their own devices and share data, files, and bandwidth with me,I used LCD screens and an overhead to project computer screens, then LED projectors, then digital computer projectors, then a blend of digital projectors and electronic whiteboard (SMART) with tablet-sized controllers, digital ink pads (Qomo), and drawing tablets (WACOM)I used digital data acquisition software and hardware (i.e. "probeware") from Vernier and PascoI set up a special GoogleDocs (before GoogleDrive was the name) account before Google made educational accounts available, had a classroom DropBox account, and used electronic distribution of reading materials and submissions of homework possible.My classes used physical texts, electronic texts (minimal, since the cost was prohibitive) and digital copies (PDF) of many, many articles from newspapers (especially NYTimes Science Tuesdays), popular science journals, and some professional science journals.Now, as I say, I am no enemy of technology and readily embrace it for my own use and in my own learning. As a skilled adult learner, I know which media best suits my preferences and proclivities as I seek to come to understand new concepts and experience new ideas.However, my students generally did not and do not have these metacognitive skills, nor have they developed or owned the disciplines needed to be able to evaluate their own learning much beyond the ability to predict whether they might pass today's quiz.Because of that issue: the lack of student self-awareness of learning and metacognition and their general lack of "expert learner" discipline, I rarely relied on electronic devices to provide significant amounts of information, but rather used them as tools for data acquisition and then tools for analyzing, displaying, and discussing the data. Most "big" information on major course concepts came from reading the physical text and re-interpretation and extension by me, as the teacher, and in group discussions. Ancillary information, current events (involving the concepts), and relevant examples of the concept came through guided readings of articles (sources mentioned earlier) and self-directed "research" of information via the Web with general guidelines and suggested search topics provided.25+ years of classroom teaching showed me that my students were just like those used in many studies of how student approach different text media. They essentially "scanned" or "skimmed" electronic media and interacted more deeply with physically printed text--if they read anything at all. Simply making the lessons more "tech-oriented" pleased the students for the first lesson or so, but once they realized they still had to develop the skills to learn the material and to integrate it into what they already knew, they came to find the new tech gadgets (first, a limited number of shared desktop computers, then a lab set of laptops, then multiple lab sets of notebook computers, and eventually individual student "netbooks") as just another "text book." The newness wore off in days. Retention of electronic media readings was lower than that of reading the physical text. I even ported my Bio-1 text to an electronic form (PDF) and assigned the same chapters. Kids just "skimmed" the electronic forms --just as they had been taught to do by the design and implementation of the billions of World Wide Web pages!So, I ask this: For k-12 students in the USA, is it any more convenient for them to own electronic copies of their textbooks on a single device (say, a Kindle or iPad) if they are NOT going to read the texts or are only going to skim them anyway?I say no.Because of the way that publishing companies have expertly set themselves up as the arbiters of curriculum in the USA, by virtue of also being the ones who oversee the writing of many of the the US States' End of Course Assessments (ECA) and of the entire Common Core (CCSS) Assessments, they effectively control what is included the textbooks and can demand whatever they want for remuneration. In my state, at least (IN), the cost of the intro biology text is as much as 6 times the cost of the same physically printed textbook. There is NO cost incentive in the long-term. There is usually an insignificant savings in the short-term.Now to other matters more practical and immediate to the teacher and student.As someone already has stated, no textbook has ever run out of power, had a dead battery, or required a special adapter for its use. ALL of these happen -- and in any school, they happen every day! This issue has an impact on the student, the teacher, classmates, and the IT department. It steals time and other precious resources (people and educational $$). The lower the grade level, the more the teacher will have to intervene--and disrupt their lesson flow and classroom time management. It is largely a non-issue with physical textbooks.If someone "forgets" their single reading device, or it is lost, stolen, damaged, or otherwise incapacitated through an Act of God (I had a student say: "My dog ate my netbook"!), ALL of their customized material is out for the day. Some of my students took advantage of this loophole in technology curation and "forgot" their netbooks regularly. Since their netbook was personalized for their set of classes before school had started, a simple "loaner" netbook would not d0--unless it had everything in every course that any student might possibly be taking that semester. Our IT folks couldn't/wouldn't do that, so "forgetful" students, or students who suffered a loss, often missed a day or more of lessons until something could be specifically set up for them. In addition, the number of loaner netbooks was necessarily small due to expense and maintenance. The number of spare computers also shrank throughout the year as loaners were brought into full-time service to replace broken, lost, or stolen computers. These are not a trivial issue in a typical school with more than 100 students. ...And Yes, Our students were on the hook to pay for lost, broken, and stolen computers. They were offered insurance at the beginning of the year at a nominal cost. This factor did not improve results. What happened is that more than a few students had parents that simply refused to pay up when their child lost or broke a computer and in the inimitable wisdom of the admin & IT folks, that student was no longer allowed to have a computer (until the parents paid the bill).The reliance primarily on keyboard input removes a thought-flowing physical act we know as handwriting. We know from research that marking up a paper with a pen & highlighter does something different in the brain than performing the same acts with a keyboard (Kindle) or even with a stylus (iPad or Tablet). While we are not yet sure of the longer-term consequences, we know that physically marking a physical text results in better memory (immediate, short-term, and for several days) of the process and the reasoning behind the markings than the electronic form of marking.Do I find "pros" with tech gadgets in the classroom?When they are used for things that only the tech gadgets can do better than previous technologies and can aid the teacher in helping the students gain knowledge, analytic skills, and to develop better self-awareness of their own learning.To that end, using an iPad as a simple reading device is, I think, a mistake. Using it to collect, display, and aid in analysis of data is a wonderful use! Using the iPad, then, to write a communication to explain what the student did and why they did it increases its usefulness. THEN--using it to browse the web to find an article in a journal that supports the student's conclusions and constructing a presentation (individual or group) that reviews the article as it applies to the recent student work has very good value.As a way to re-do worksheets and make them more "appy," or to be the receptacle of the textbook...>>Phhbbbbbbttt!!<<(For those who do not recognize that last outburst - it is a "raspberry" and a display of derision.)There is more that can be said, but I bow to the constraints of time and Quoran space.