Yesterday’s newspaper had two interesting news items about Anna University. One was about a huge number of scholars getting PhDs from Anna University. And the other was about the sudden surge in the activity of papers published by Anna University.

First, about the “377 PhDs being awarded“. For those who are lazy to read the article, here are the important bits:

• 377 scholars is a record in the 29 year history of the university. Last year only 160 scholars got PhDs.
• 300 of the 377 scholars are faculties of self-financing colleges. The vice-chancellor says that “this automatically indicates that the colleges will have competent faculty with better qualification”.
• 89 students will be awarded the gold medal with 29 of them from private engineering colleges.

Reading this, people would immediately think that Anna University is a great institute to pursue your higher education. Before you jump to such hasty conclusions, a little bit of history.

A few years ago (about 3-4 years), there was some kind of a visit by AICTE or some comittee from Anna University. They started to question the competency of the staffs and remarked that only PhDs could become a Head of the Department. Till that point most departments of the self-financing colleges were headed by BE (and very few ME) graduates.

Immediately the next year people began to register for part time/full time courses for their higher education. The incentive was that getting a PhD would look good on resume, would lead to higher pay and better job title.

To give an example of the competency of the staff - there was a lecturer who was about to finish his ME and his dissertation was about a spam detection software (which he bought it off the readymade project market). On reading his paper, a familiar name caught my eyes. This project was later taken over by another lecturer (who was a Head of Dept) and she did the project with the help of a few students from my class. This reminded me of the name and I searched for the name “Spamato” and let Google feel lucky - bingo I was taken over to this page of the open source spam filter system.

They weren’t even building/contributing new stuff to the project. All they did was to compile the stuff (it took them 6 months to get it compiled without errors) and it was just a basic rule based system (no, they didn’t know about bayesian filters yet) with a blacklist of words. Last I heard, one student from the group which helped the lecturer was using this same project for her MS.

This is what most of the lecturers in private engineering colleges in India do. This means, most of the 300 of 377 PhDs are of no use - which brings us to the second new item “Anna University pips IITs for top slot in research publications“.

To summarize this news item,

• Anna University has published 311 research papers and has an activity index of 1.83 (the highest in the country) way more than the IITs. The IITs are somewhere in the 0.91 to 1.17 range.
• The vice chancellor says “we are ahead of the IITs now in the activity index”.
• However, when it comes to impact index, Anna University doesn’t even come in the top 10 universities. Not many papers published by Anna University scholars are cited (I doubt whether they are even read).

This shouldn’t be a shock, as with more people trying to get a PhD (for the money and name) more papers need to be written by them. Which leads to a higher activity index. Of course with people who go to “instant project/dissertation shops” for getting a research paper, the paper they publish has no real value.

Of course in a country where getting a doctorate is so easy that even tennis stars can get it sitting in a 2 hour function - who cares what research they did?

1. sudarsanyes Says:
   December 19th, 2008 at 6:10 pm

   Yeah. I completely agree with this. You can find the same every where in India. Most of them even spoil those who are really interested in programming and technology despite spoiling themselves.

2. Vengu Says:
   December 20th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

   Pthoo.. What a shame?! If this is true then I would’ne recommend anna university to anybody~!

3. Bhasker V Kode Says:
   December 22nd, 2008 at 11:38 am

   I guess “drinking your own kool-aid” bloats you up. Ignorance should be their greatest teacher. But sadly they rather be drowned in it.

   ~B

   PS: i’ve touched points along the same line over at http://bosky101.blogspot.com/2008/12/following-is-edited-version-of-mail.html