Skeptic

I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours. This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it. Let me tell you what actually happened. The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12. 381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find. India sent five kids. All five came back with gold. Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad. We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :) That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan. Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them. Now here is what the exam actually was. Two papers. Each five hours long. The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs. The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids. That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer. Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours. HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too. Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO. Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze. In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver. Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade. Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018. So who built this. The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy. They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane. The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai. The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri. Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra. This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own. The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast. That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world. But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think. That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years. So yes, be proud. Loudly. HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD. But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India. I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have. But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying. Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.

The Indian Delegation at IPhO (International Physics Olympiad) has won all gold medals! Here's the team that won it all - 🥇 Kanishk Jain 🥇 Riddhesh Anant Bendale 🥇 Rishit Garg 🥇 Shresth Suraiya 🥇 Svarit Joshi

There's another issue: I believe problem-solving ability (doing well on exams) and actual research ability are strongly correlated below a certain threshold. However, once you exceed that threshold, the correlation becomes almost zero. I know many PhD students from China’s elite universities who are extremely good at solving problems but have essentially empty minds when it comes to research. Their research taste is very poor. For example, I know a student who ranked among the top in his province in the Gaokao (China’s extremely rigorous and difficult national college entrance exam, similar in selectivity to India’s IIT entrance). He later entered an economics PhD program in China. Yet both his research taste and publication record are quite mediocre. In empirical economics, he belongs to the “star-counting” type—someone who only cares about statistical significance and will use any means necessary to get it, while showing complete indifference to the credibility revolution.

Math is the one subject where broad, encouraging statements targeted towards the mean are met overwhelmingly with statements like "well AKSHULLY not everyone can do math, don't you know about Von Neumann? So you think someone with 80IQ could be Einstein??" It's annoying!

I checked PM Modi’s timeline expecting at least a word of sympathy for the three Indians killed in a U.S. military strike. There is none. Not a condolence message. Not a public expression of grief. Instead, the timeline is dominated by replies to world leaders congratulating him on becoming India’s longest-serving Prime Minister.