| | 8 May 2019HIGHERReviewIN MY VIEWIn a study published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of Ameri-ca in March 2019, the researchers led by a Stanford professor observed that Computer Science skills of the fourth-year computer science students from the USA ex-ceeded those of our students in India. Among the three countries of China, India, and Russia, which the study compared against the USA, India performed the worst. What is shocking is that graduates from the Indian elite institutes also performed worse vis-à-vis students from the elite institutes in the USA. So far, we believed that while our graduate programs lag behind those in the USA, our undergraduate programs are comparable. But that is not true, even for elite institutes.If you look at what skills did the study used, it is about applications of the core fundamentals of computer science. In other words, it is not about knowing defini-tions, rules, theorems, and algorithms but the use of all those to the problems at our hands. For example, know-ing scheduling algorithms for an operating system does not mean one is capable of selecting, adapting, and in-strumenting those algorithms to get the tasks done op-timally. The skill is not super special, which is required only for the higher studies. It is even more basic than that. When our students graduate and join the industry, they feel lost because they cannot find which concepts to apply to complete their assigned tasks. The AICTE and the stalwarts of the Indian IT industry, such as By Vinayak Naik, Professor of Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and ScienceWHAT DOES IT TAKE TO TURN KNOWLEDGE INTO POWER?Vinayak NaikPh.D. is a Professor of Computer Science at BITS Pilani. He has taught at IIIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IISc. He has received Teaching Excellence awards at IIIT Delhi. In 2016, he was awarded the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award.
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