Transcript

Hacking into the Indian education system | Debarghya Das | TEDxBangalore

hi guys um my name is dear godas as you can see uh I go by DD and last year uh some of you might have heard of this I I hacked the Indian education system and I want to tell you a little bit more about it but first I want to tell you a little story a little personal story very close to my heart I went to high school in Kolkata I I know the accent doesn't sound like it but I went to high school in Kolkata and when I went to high school I had my best friend was this guy called Tintin and Tintin kind of embodies everything that the the Indian teenager today is he hated school he absolutely hated it he'd go every day teachers who were unqualified would read off page after page of textbook and it was boring and he didn't like it he liked music of course he he loved to play the guitar he was extremely good at playing the guitar but even more than music I think the coolest thing about Tintin is he really liked sound he like acoustic engineering he really wanted to do something in that in that field but unfortunately class 10 came around he didn't do very well he didn't get science he got Commerce didn't like Commerce very much um in class 11 he failed in class 12 very unfortunately he passed away in a very tragic accident and um what can you do see education is something very dear to India we all know that you pick up an average paper this is what comes up this is out I just Googled something two months two months of news and this is what comes up education is huge in India it's a it's your road up the social ladder is education and it's not done well and people like Tintin every day crumble under the pressure of the Indian education system and many others face its challenges and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that overall in my talk I'm going to tell you about what I did last year I'm going to tell you that and some other problems with the Indian education system and I want to tell you that we can actually solve this problem we have solved problem and how we can bring It Forward into India you see let me first start with how how Education Works in India for those of you who don't know you go to school teacher reads page after page for 10 10 15 years you get to class 10 you give your boards you regurgitate all the information um and the boards are a big deal because the boards are a national thing it's sometimes it's a state thing it's either the ICC the cbsc um your state boards you give your board exam and then you expect a 16-year-old who gave his board exam to decid what he wants to do in life he doesn't know anything about life he's worried about his girlfriend and you tell him whether you want whe whether he wants to study science or Commerce and Humanities and all these tough words that doesn't even know half of them mean and then after he does that two years after class 10 after class 12 he gives another one of these board exams after regates all that information that he learned and based on that one mark that he gets the one result in his class 12 board exams that decides his future that decides which college he goes to most Arts science business colleges as you all know they only want your class 12 board results for engineering it's a little better sure you also have an entrance test so in addition to high school you take tuition and then do that as well and for Law and medicine it's it's just bizarre you don't even need to go to high school you you study for your entrance exam you become lawyer or a doctor it's absolutely fragmented it's absolutely bizarre how the Indian education system works this this comic I really like this comic it kind of demonstrates what the Indian education does to you it kills your creativity it kills everything that you're passionate about see Indian India doesn't really have an education system at all has an examination system that's what it has there's there's funny joke there's two types of knowledge in India there's knowledge that's in the syllabus and there's things things you don't need to know and the ends always justify the means it's whatever at the end of the day no one cares if you've learned anything you come back home your mother doesn't ask you if you learned anything they ask you one question how much did you get did you get 100 in math no and so last year I did this really cool thing and to be honest I I wasn't trying to change the world I just wanted to do something cool and hacked into the Indian education system and I downloaded over a million students results from the cbsc the ISC the ICC and I did some analysis on them and I found some great great flaws some of them you already know some of them were just conspiracy theories that you never knew could be proved and I think I might have proved some of them so you know big data right we're in Bangalore we're in the tech capital of India big data is a big tech buzzword and and big data is what happens when you have a lot of information it's really hard to deal with a lot of information cuz it's a lot of numbers and you need to make sense of it and with the computing power we have today we can make sense of these big big numbers and companies do it all the time for example I I'll give you an example in at Facebook you can detect images you detect faces and images you are all on Facebook you all know this you that image detection algorithm can detect faces better than humans 98% accuracy and then cheating we have algorithms that can detect cheating more than than any other teacher if you're if you if you copied from Wikipedia they know and we've all done it and so when I had all this data right a million students it's very big number to even imagine a million students at all their results how do you process this what what can you find out of this information my problem was much much easier than all all these big guys Facebook and everything and so I did some stuff and I want to tell you what I found out you see first things first privacy right no one really thinks about it in fact after I published this the only lectures of privacy I got were from the American people you know you're you're how can you do this this is this is horrible how how are these results up in the open and the thing is India has a culture of public shaming and praising on marks right Hey guys you're you're not a statistic you're not a number you're not you you don't deserve to be put on a chronological list of how you did at school that is not your true selfworth it's not and the fact that all these numbers are open you just go online you you type in your number you get your IC result right you type in your number add one to it you get your friend's number and then you're like oh I I he did better than me I I'm horrible and that's something we really need to that's the first thing I think we need to fix but you know in in in one way I'm pretty happy that this wasn't private cuz I'll tell you some more things don't don't try to make too much sense of this in the cbsc cbsc is a standardized test right A lot of people give this the cbsc and with standardized tests you're supposed to have a standardized distribution not exactly like this but this is the SAT distribution so that's how the marks as for each column vertical column on that graph the number of students who get it the higher the green line the more number of students who got that and it's a continuous graph it looks really nice right and that's how most most standardized exams are and then that's the cbsc graph do you know what you know what the first hump is it's a pass Mark right and I've told people this and they're like yeah yeah that's obvious yeah Grace marks right no big deal there's 5% of our our our country that we're passing and they don't deserve to pass and they all think they're lucky you know I did well and I just passed they they didn't pass they were passed and the second hump is even worse right the second hump is 95 and that's that's Elite colleges that's what it depends on why is it there I don't know but that can't be there it's a statistical inaccuracy the probability of that humping there is so low that you could expect to be murdered tonight and that's that that probability would be higher than this yeah I got that right I want to show you some more things um come on Bangalore is full of Engineers right tell me what this sequence of numbers or this group of numbers represents what's common between all these numbers in in the ISC 2014 if you ask any of your friends you know any of your friends who gave the ISC ask them how much they got in any subject they won't tell you but you know if they do tell you they won't have got these marks strange right why wouldn't anyone get a 93 no one got a 93 no one got any of these marks in 2014 60,000 people gave this exam five subjects each in no subject in no in no year even this year and last year nobody attained these marks it makes no sense what's going on and I think I have an hypothesis right so it it can't be these marks happened some teacher somewhere in India gave these marks something happened to it it was changed it's horrible it's a horrible thing to do and your life depends on this right I want to tell you something about the butterfly effect I find this concept fascinating there's a movie about it too the butterfly effect is when in a deterministic system a small change you don't have to understand the small change in the set of initial events changes the outcome in the end I'll give you an example imagine in India a woman goes to work you know has a bad day at work comes home screams at her husband and her husband's is she's very angry and he has to grade all these exams and he he's an ISC exam grader you know he just wants to make the most money wants to get rid of all these exams quickly go to sleep takes out this pile of 100 papers and it's about English papers and he's he's he's really angry and he marks them low bad mood changed so many lives in that day it happens I have data to prove that this happens in English in the cbsc in the ISC from year to year the averages of each School change by more than 57% it all depends on who's correcting it right all of that decides your future decides which college you go to this is this is another really interesting comic I came into and a lot of people don't think of this right because when you give when you offer these subjects to kids and you you're graded on the same Benchmark you're graded on the absolute number you get in the end and you offer all these different subjects so you would assume that in all the subjects it's equally hard to get a 95 and an 85 and everything but that's not true in fact in both the boards depending on which subjects you take you can make a 30% difference in your grade 30% that's the difference between going to the best college in India and not going to a college anywhere the subject choices right I thought of this last night did you heard the da Punk song we're up all night to get lucky that's basically the Indian education system in a nutshell it's incredible Our lives our lives are in the hand of Fate you know you didn't Sagar got 99.6 the reason he did was he was lucky there were people who deserved it they didn't get it he got the right graders and it's great but are we really going to let the lives of our future youth depend depend on luck I don't think so I think we have we have a solution for this a lot of people don't agree with me but right now I work at corsera and in corsera does online education and you might think of online education as oh a lot of videos and what whatever but it's it's a lot more than that see mukes aren't massive on open online classes and mukes can take the luck out of any education system and they have been at corsera I work with three people on my team who never went to college they were passionate about what they did and it's not just in America edex corsera Udacity are changing education across the world some of you might recognize some of these universities right can you imagine 10 years ago from your bedroom you know you're going to sleep you're lying on bed with a laptop you can learn for free from people who went to Berkeley Berkeley College of Music John Mayer went to Berkeley College of Music you can learn from the same people who taught John Mayer in your bedroom people who did study math at Princeton you know Fields medal winners Noble laurates at University of Chicago teaching economics you can learn anything from the greatest professor in the world you just have to open your computer and I think I think that's amazing I want to show you some some little facts and and figures there's 70,000 I alumna you know I is always the Benchmark right there's 170,000 I alumna in total in all their history in India actually I think everywhere right now in two years at at corsera there's four times that amount already and there's more potential there's 130 million internet users we can educate a 130 million people so scalable and it works it works you know why why it works I'll tell you this this wasn't the slide I had yesterday this guy I I met this guy yesterday his name is bage is in the audience somewhere I want I want first let me tell you about him and then you can give him a round of applause bage you know typical story you know he hated class everyone hates class he went to Bombay he studied he did his degree in business or whatever he didn't care about it and then he discovered online education right it transformed him he's a CEO and founder at 22 he manages people and he runs his business he designed these slides give him a round of applause you know a few weeks ago Joseph stiglets he's an economic Noble laurate he came to corsera and he said something that really struck me he said we still live in a world today where the greatest gift you can have is choosing the right parents to be born to if you really think about it that's so true what our parents can do for us decides our whole future it's all luck even from the very beginning and there's a very famous talk by Ken Robinson also of Ted and he says high high quality education is a fundamental human right high quality being the operate of words here high quality education and I want to leave you with one thought you know I want you guys to go home maybe today maybe tomorrow discover your passion go online take some classes really learn for the sake of learning and I assure you you will get somewhere in life challenge don't stop complaining about the system we all complain we love to complain about the system and look at what today has taught us the ugly Indian NES Nar and they're so beautiful CU they're challenging the system I want you guys to go and challenge education thank you