International summit, RTI campaign at Techfest
IIt-bombay’s technology festival, Techfest, is hosting a range of pre-events in the coming weeks, aiming to make students participate in democracy and contribute to social initiatives. A Right to Information (RTI) workshop in September will teach participants the importance of the act, and how to use it, while an international student conference on renewable energy invites research papers from students by September 5.
“We hope this will empower the community. These students are prospective engineers, and we want to enable those from technical backgrounds to use the RTI act effectively,” says Bhaskar Prabhu, convenor of Mahiti Adhikar Manch, (National Campaign for People’s Right to Information) NCPRI. “This will help them take responsibility for social issues, and learn to confront problems efficiently.”
Techfest will be held from January 2 to 4, and expects footfalls of 1.5 lakh students from across 2,500 colleges. Here are some details on what their preevents will hold. workshop will be followed by an event where students will learn to fill an RTI application.
The detailed schedule of the workshops will be soon available on Techfest’s website: www.techfest.org/ask/ currently the vice chancellor of TERI University.
Register: Submit your paper to conference@techfest.org in a prescribed template, which can be found at www.techfest.org/ conference/callforpapers.
In India there are so many different tests, that we often forget to ask about their varying uses by the institutions which evaluate them. Whether it is the CAT, JEE, NEET, CLAT or even ICSE and HSC board exams, these tests are primarily used for entrance or placement. If your score is below a certain number, you cannot be admitted to college. For the most part, the tests in the US and UK are not used in this way — they are only one data point used in relation to several others to determine admissions. They are not entrance exams; rather they are used as an indication of a student’s capacity for a particular level of academic work.
Ultimately, what this means is that in a batch of admissions, there is a range of scores represented by incoming students. A student with a lower score on the SAT may have other factors in their profile that can make it up. Sometimes these other factors are within the applicant’s control (like school grades or extra curriculars) and sometimes they are not (like legacy status or institutional priorities). Applicants are often confused by the idea that they could have top marks and top standardised test scores, but still not be admitted to their first choice university.
The consensus among admissions officers is that a high score on a standardised test is necessary, but not a sufficient condition for admissions. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, repeats, year after year, that they turn away more students with a perfect SAT score than they admit.
However, all the lip service to the idea that the SAT or ACT scores are not terribly important to admissions decisions can be misleading. What it really means is that once a student has demonstrated high academic aptitude through grades and test scores, it is other criteria which tip the admissions decision one way or another. If the student is in the