Tag: the print

Just one Object

When I teach courses in introductory statistics, my focus isn’t so much on helping students memorize definitions and formulas as it is on helping them understand the point of the core statistical concepts.

I often ask a student in class to tell us about their favorite movie, for example. Let’s assume that the student in question says “Dulhe Raja”.* Ok, I might say, rate the movie for us. And let’s assume that the student says 9.

I then ask the student if every single aspect of the movie is 9/10. All the songs, all of the fight sequences, all of the dialogues, every single directorial decision – is everything a 9/10? And the usual answer, of course, is no. Parts of the movie do much worse, and there might be some that are a perfect 10. But all in all, if the entire movie had to be summarized in just one number, that number would be nine (in that student’s opinion). Which, of course, is one way to think about averages. It’s a great way to summarize, distill or boil down a dataset into just one data point.

Of course, you would want to worry about whether each dimension of the movie has been given equal importance or otherwise. Dilli-6, for example, gets a score of 6/10 from me, but that’s because the music is just so utterly fantastic. But I’m giving much more importance to the music, and not that much importance to anything else (which, for me, was almost uniformly meh). And then, of course, we start to talk about weighted averages. And this also is a great way to segue into what standard deviation is all about. Then come the formulas and the problem solving, but that’s a whole other story.

So why am I speaking about this right now? Because I read an article in The Print the other day, which asked an interesting question that reminded me of all of what I’ve written about above:

If there was a cultural artefact that truly represents everything that is India today, what would it be?

https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/rasgulla-taj-mahal-sanskrit-what-if-i-told-you-to-pick-one-object-that-represents-india/1175979/

What a question to think about, no? Read the rest of the article to find out the author’s own answer, but in what follows, I want to try and think through my own answer to this question.

First, the recognition that we’re talking about a truly multi-dimensional problem. India is diverse in terms of her geography, her languages, her dance forms, her religions, her architecture, her food, her music – I can go on and on. As, I’m sure, can you!

So should we try and come up with an artefact that covers all (or as many dimensions as possible) at once? Maybe a movie, maybe a song, maybe an epic? But can (and should) a movie or a song encompass all of what India is across space and time?

The Mahabharata, maybe? A saga told in multiple languages, in various forms, from the viewpoint of many different protagonists, interpreted in a variety of ways over the centuries, and contains innumerable references to music, dance, food, sport, architecture besides so much else.

The only other artefact that might qualify must have something to do with food. We might have different ingredients, different techniques and different methods of preparing our food, but we all love a good meal, no? So might there be a dish, or a drink, that truly represents everything that India is today?

Tea? Nimbu paani? Khichdi?

Or does this dataset have so much variance that the average isn’t really a good representation?

I haven’t yet found an answer that satisfies me – which is a good thing! – but I do think I have found a good question to teach statistics better. No?

*This is a fantastic movie, and I will not be taking any questions.

Links you might like to read about India and the corona virus

Prachi Singh, Shamika Ravi and Sikim Chakraborty run the numbers on India’s health infrastructure, and the results are less than perfect:

In this piece we focus on availability of government hospital beds for major states in India. Using data from National Health Profile–2019, we observed that there are 7,13,986 total government hospital beds available in India. This amounts to 0.55 beds per 1000 population. The elderly population (aged 60 and above) is especially vulnerable, given more complications which are reported for patients in this age group. The availability of beds for elderly population in India is 5.18 beds per 1000 population.

The Print has an analysis of the people in the taskforce handling the crisis at the very top.

The Ken had a story some days ago about testing in India (you’ll need to sign in to read it). Hopefully, the situation is better now.

Jean Dreze has some suggestions about tackling the economic impact of the lockdown, particularly the poorest sections of Indian society.

… as does Reetika Khera.

 

On The State of Higher Education in India (#1 of n)

Quite unexpectedly, I have ended up writing what will be an ongoing series about discovering more about the Indian Constitution. It began because I wanted to answer for myself questions about how the Indian Constitution came to be, and reading more about it has become a rather engaging rabbit hole.

Increasingly, it looks as if Mondays (which is when I write about India here) will now alternate between essays on the Indian Constitution and the topic of today’s essay: the state of (higher) education in India.

The series about the Constitution is serendipity; the series about education is an overwhelming passion.

I’ve been teaching at post-graduate institutions for the past decade now, and higher education in India is problematic on many, many counts. I’ll get into all of them in painstaking detail in the weeks to come, today is just about five articles you might want to read to give yourself an overview of where we are.

In the last 30 years, higher education in India has witnessed rapid and impressive growth. The increase in the number of institutions is, however, disproportionate to the quality of education that is being dispersed.

That is from the “Challenges” section of the Wikipedia article on higher education in India. The section highlights financing, enrollment, accreditation and politics as major challenges. To which I will add (and elaborate upon in the weeks to come) signaling, pedagogy, evaluation, overemphasis on classroom teaching, the return on investment – (time and money both), relevance, linkages to the real world, out-of-date syllabi, and finally under-emphasis on critical thinking and writing.

“Educational attainment in present-day India is also not directly correlated to employment prospects—a fact that raises doubts about the quality and relevance of Indian education. Although estimates vary, there is little doubt that unemployment is high among university graduates—Indian authorities noted in 2017 that 60 percent of engineering graduates remain unemployed, while a 2013 study of 60,000 university graduates in different disciplines found that 47 percent of them were unemployable in any skilled occupation. India’s overall youth unemployment rate, meanwhile, has remained stuck above 10 percent for the past decade.”

That is from an excellent summary of higher education in India. It is a very, very long read, but I have not been able to find a better in-one-place summary of education in India.

A series of charts detailing some statistics about higher education in India, by the Hindu. For reasons I’ll get into in the weeks to come, the statistics are somewhat misleading.

Overall, it seems from this survey, which shows impressive strides on enrollment, college density and pupil-teacher ratio, that we have finally managed to fix the supply problem. Now, we need to focus on the quality.

Swarajyamag reports on the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) in India, 2016-17. As the report mentions, we have come a long way in terms of fixing the supply problem in higher education – we now need to focus on the much more important (and alas, much more difficult) problem of quality.

“Strange as it might look, the quality of statistics available for our higher education institutes has been much poorer than our statistics on school education. Sensing this gap, the central government instituted AISHE in 2011-12. We now have official (self-reported and unverified) statistics on the number and nature of higher education institutions, student enrolment, and pass-out figures along with the numbers for teaching and non-teaching staff. Sadly, this official survey does not tell us much about the quality of teaching, learning or research. There is no equivalent of Pratham’s ASER survey or the NCERT’s All India School Education Survey.”

That is from The Print ,and it takes a rather dimmer view than does Swarajyamag. With reference to the last two links especially, read both of them without bias for or against, beware of mood affiliation!

Education needs to become much, much, much more relevant than it currently is in India, and half of the Mondays to come in 2020 will be about teaching myself more about this topic. I can’t wait!