JEE Counseling, Conventions And Parents

I hate Indian Education system. I think that as I grow up, I might find something due to which my parents and some other people regards it so high. But it never happens. Every new encounter of mine leaves me even more disappointed.

This post is about my disgusting while the choice filling process of JOSSA.

JOSSA's/NIC's website

India is now one of the biggest IT capitals of the modern world and all the major players in the world IT sector are present in the country

We hear a ton about Digital India and Smart City these days. On the other hand, I use absolute websites like JOSSA and JAC Delhi made by NIC, the premier technology organization of India's Union Government in informatics services. Its authentication system is extremely buggy. The website is extremely slow(I used it on net connection with a speed of 5MBps). I never talk about UI/UX of government websites. They are, as usual, non-existence. A student usually chooses more than 20 choices. What tools do we get to arrange them?

• Move a choice step by step upward or downward - Click the upward arrow on the choice and it moves up by 1 position and vice versa. Sounds okay? Well, it usually took more than 10 seconds after clicking the icon for the choice to move up. Sometimes it didn't happen at all and it gave no error message. Now think about this - you have to move a choice on a 19th number to 5th number. It will take you at least two minutes to do so, provided that you are not automatically logged out(which happens a lot) and encounter loops of no actions clicks.
• The assigning number to each of your choice - If you have to put the bottom most choice on the top then you have to assign number manually to each choice. It's is awful. You get lost in numbers. It takes time. And when you get logged out twice at last stage of assigning numbers, you write posts of this kind.
• I didn't use the third option much except for two times. It was so useless.

How much time do you get to choose your colleges?

4-5 days. We have to lock our choices within 4-5 days of getting our ranks. Predicting you ranks is not easy. Rank Predictor are kind of unreliable and you have no idea about your board percentile. Various resources mentioned that my predicted rank was around 10k. Therefore, I got months to research on the college that I could possibly get into and then choice my preference accordingly.

But I got a rank of 19k.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Now, I have to go through more than 20 colleges with so similar names(NITs and IIITs) in just 3 days with my parents saying this, "Abhi tak choice nahi fill kar pai", every now and then.

Colleges Websites

Most websites of NITs violate the very point of their existences. They do not provide information, I failed to find the details about curriculum, faculty, student-teacher ratio, and research centers on the college's website. In such case, people are forced to use website like quora, on which I find this sarcastic comment of Dheeraj Sanghi perfectly apt :

Quora is obviously the most trustworthy source of all important data (which most placement offices do not even release). People on quora will claim that the "best" IIT had only 99% of its job offers from within India, while the other run-of-the-mill IITs had a huge 99.5% of their job offers from within India. And this huge difference (which you should trust since it is on quora) is the best predictor of the success of ALL students of that IIT over the next 50 years of career. Quora will also tell you that the average offer in IIT-1 was Rs. 15 lakhs, while it was Rs. 14.8 lakhs in IIT-2. That the percentage of students placed is 93% in IIT-3 versus 92.5% in IIT-4. These huge differences can not be because of different way of computing these numbers, and of course, could not be questioned because they are on quora, and the only significance of these differences is that IIT-1 is better than IIT-2, and IIT-3 is better than IIT-4. (Don't even think about what happens if IIT-3 is same as IIT-2, and IIT-4 is same as IIT-1. We will come up some other metric to justify whichever IIT you want to join.)

Parents Helps

I was messed up. I have to take one of the most important decisions in my life in three days and there was almost no data and reliable suggestions/views. Words of every person made me more confused. Each person has its own views about everything and they hardly gave answers to the whys. When
Parents are like just fill out the preferences by looking at the closing rank and the college's distance from home. And I'm like What? What? What? What? What?
And then I hear the list of events where I have been proved wrong, why I should do what he says, and blah blah blah.
And the answer to why I should do this starts with "Khud ko tum sabse intelligent samjte ho. Saari duniya toh pagal hai. bas tum hi ek ho intelligent" and ends with similars stuff.

A sarcastic comment on this approach of students and parents

The order in which you should be filling up your choices. After all, the students, the parents, and the whole Internet (particularly quora) couldn't be wrong. Don't even think about the possibility that last year too, everyone filled up the choices based on previous year's closing ranks.
But you should be seen as doing due diligence. This is, after all, the most important decision of your life. And you shouldn't only follow the right methodology (which is, of course, to follow the last year's closing ranks), but should be seen as actively trying to do due diligence.