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DRAFT
EXPERIMENTS WITH THE SILVER BULLET FOR CRACKING COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Any fiercely sought after success by a very large body of students in a competitive examination becomes a social event. This will naturally have positive savoury aspects and also negative unsavoury aspects. The example of the GATE examination is taken. Experiments were conducted for about a decade to test out a directive from Prof. C A R Hoare, of Oxford, when he visited India. He suggested that one should search for common sense explanations in the study and expositon of concepts and principles in engineering and science. The experiments spanning a decade were conducted in real life. They involved the direct training/coaching of a couple of thousand students to tackle GATE in a few conceptually challenging and difficult subject areas, with hundreds of success stories and observing firsthand the progress of about half a lakh aspiring students in a spectrum of subject areas, again with hundreds of success stories. No entry level screening of the students was done except for the requirement that they were bonafide students in the third or fourth year of undergraduate engineering education. Recently qualified students awaiting employment, some postgraduate students and a sprinkling of engineering college faculty were also part of the audience. They spanned a large spectrum of intellectual capability from the mediocre to excellent. Their entry level technical preparation for the experiments spanned a wide spectrum from very poor to very good. Based on the success story a savoury technical model is outlined for aspiring students and GATE shops. The unsavoury behind the scenes activities the business model involves and threats looming on the horizon are then outlined for general social consumption.

PART I : THE PROPHECIES OF SUCCESS
GATE: SOARING TO THE CLOUDS
THE GATE SHOP: TECHNICAL MODEL
CRACKING GATE: THE SILVER BULLET
GENRALISING THE SILVER BULLET
TECHNICALLY AUDITING A GATE SHOP

PART II: THE PROPHECIES OF DOOM
GATE: PLUNGING TO THE DEPTHS
THE OUTSOURCING SCENARIO
GATE AND OUTSOURCING
THE GATE SHOP: BUSINESS MODEL
THE GATE SHOP: BUSINESS MODEL REVISITED
REJUVENATING GATE

PART I
FOR THE ASPIRING STUDENT: THE SAVOURY PATH TO SUCCESS
”It was the best of times…..We are all going direct to heaven……”

For wide circulation.
GATE: SOARING TO THE CLOUDS
Over the last half a century the Tier I engineering educational institutions in India. viz., the older IITs and IISc have managed to elevate themselves to the enviable pedestal of not being subject to scrutiny, or being answerable or accountable to any temporal or spiritual agency or authority.
One of the lesser jewels in their crown, to protect their exclusive world, has been the GATE examination which screens and determines entry level aspirants for postgraduate engineering education in a sizable number of higher tier institutions. Incidentally this examination is also used by the Government of India for screening and entry level qualification to some prestigious R&D institutions.
Since its low standard at the time of its inception it had steadily improved as the demand and credibility for it grew.
THE GATE SHOP: TECHNICAL MODEL
The GATE examination syllabus is pompously large and forbidding. It has varied over the last two decades of the GATE examination with the same pompous characteristics. A student contemplating this syllabus and its variations in his/her area of interest stands in awe and fear as when beholding Goliath in all his arrogance. Unsuccessful GATE shops have tried to cover as much of the syllabus as they could by the formal instructional process. They found that an imaginary number of students were successful. They closed down. The student could not combat Goliath. The student has to be converted to a David. The catapult has to be found.
Successful GATE shops followed a more agile method that directly considers the questions in the examinations. GATE is a very young examination. It is hardly two decades old. The entire legacy of previous question papers is easily available in any urban college bookshop.
A comprehensive study is made in an area of all the questions in all the previous papers, with each question being cursorily studied for classification purposes. The study only takes an intense effort of 3-4 days as the database is tiny. A coarse first level classification of the questions based on subjects is made. Then in the second pass over the questions a fine grained classification is made as per the topic in the subject. A simple pattern emerges. The questions cluster around a small number of narrow topics. Standard questions from standard text books, either copied verbatim or used with small variations abound. Repetitions, variations and metamorphoses of problems are plenty. A clear pattern emerges on the strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, favorite topics and texts in the collective wisdom of the paper setters and examiners. Third and susequent passes over the entire set of questions help in the identification of the concepts and principles that recur in the question papers.
The student only has to repeatedly study or be instructed in the collection of topics the syllabus has reduced to. This can be done either from the subject point of view or alternatively the subject as defined by fuzzy solution areas to the collection of legacy questions. A reverse mapping from the questions is like a bunch of fixed spotlights on a subject. Only the bright patches need be considered. Goliath has collapsed.
CRACKING GATE: THE SILVER BULLET
Coming back to the technical model, repeated study of a topic alone may not usually obtain the answer to a GATE question. The question may have twists. Approximate solutions are of no use. High quality approaches to the solutions and actual solutions of the legacy questions are required. The narrow collection of topics now reduces to GATE questions with twists. Goliath has been replaced by a pack of baby werewolves, and legend has it that a werewolf can only be destroyed with a silver bullet.
Successful GATE shops first instruct the student in the isolated narrow collection of topics. When the student comes of age, the initiation into the mantra for the silver bullet takes place, along with solutions to legacy question papers.
The GATE shops finally impart the hallowed instruction in the silver bullet for the GATE examination: the method of elimination for multiple choice questions. This silver bullet has a great deal in common with Simulation studies, as noted by Prof. C. A. R. Hoare. It rigorously trains the student how to determine what is not in the subject rather than knowing what is in the subject. The student becomes an expert in determining the wrong answers.
The silver bullet has interesting properties. Like the plutonium in a fast breeder nuclear reactor it can grow by repeated use in size, power and effectiveness. It is first applied to a motley collection of questions from guides, question banks and mock test question papers which are in the public domain and given by GATE shops. The beauty is that the though these may be of dubious quality the silver bullet grows in power with each question regardless of its correctness, quality or level of difficulty. The it is brought up to the critical mass by applying it to a collection of real problems chosen from a reasonable sample of previous GATE papers, all of which are in the public domain. Then at its critical mass it is applied by the student in the final examination.
The net result the GATE shops and students is to magically and effectively swamp not only their pockets but also incidentally the IITs and other institutions that give credence to the GATE score. All this thanks to the fact that the GATE examination has steadily become easier over the years.
High quality of faculty helps but is not essential in the development of the silver bullet. The students can sincerely work in pairs or small motivated self-organizing teams. They should have a very patient average quality faculty member or some team member who plays the role with whom they can verabalise their attempted solutions. This also ensures growth of the silver bullet.
One of the important properties of the silver bullet is that it ensures the growth in the quality of the faculty also for coaching purposes. The faculty member degenerates to cycle shop faculty level and becomes an expert in instructing even mediocre students in techniques for guessing and/or determining the wrong answers.
The silver bullet does not work for all questions. GATE 2003 is uniformly fecund in questions that are resistant to the silver bullet. However it also has a sizable number of questions, some of them pompously forbidding, that are easily susceptible to it.
GENRALISING THE SILVER BULLET
The silver bullet can be applied as a general rule to any competitive examination in any discipline, in any subject, in any language, in any culture and in any situation, where the questions are in the multiple choice format. It works best if a database of real life questions exists in the public domain. However, regardless of the quality of the question the silver bullet will grow in power with use. Thus it can even be used with some notable success in the GRE & TOEFL examinations where the real questions are ostensibly in the private domain, but a data warehouse of questions of mixed quality exists internationally in the public and grey markets, and with the student community. It can generally be used for competitive examinations determining entrance to Business Schools the world over. It can be applied to some international entrance examinations for undergraduate studies in educational institutions in various countries. However in the undergraduate entrance examination for Tier I institutions in India it can only be applied for superior results by students who possess both breadth and depth of knowledge across the prescribed syllabus. If care is not taken to shield the questions from the silver bullet the examination standard and results can degenerate as in GATE.
When competitive examinations based on the multiple choice examination exist, agencies of all types of respectability, from all walks of life, come forward with mock tests and examinations which may be either offline or online. They are either at cost or ostensibly free and social service oriented, but basically after the associated publicity. Guides at various levels of quality exist for any competitive examination. The concept of the silver bullet shows that both mock tests and guides are all useful in developing the power of the silver bullet. However, to bring it to its critical mass a collection of real life questions, possibly drawn from legacy question papers, is essential. Relying on legacy question papers is essentially playing the dangerous game of extrapolation. We are trying to predict the future. However, the student is interested only in the next examination and the time frame for that is almost immediately in the future. This allows extrapolation to be successfully used.
It many be mentioned in passing that application of the silver bullet is akin to the eternal fable of the six blind men and the elephant.
Let us consider our friend and model student David whom we met some time ago. We arm him with the catapult and he destroys Goliath. When Goliath transformed himself into a pack of werewolves he attacked them with the silver bullet. Then he grew the silver bullet in size till it reached its critical mass, like a large lump of plutonium, and he blasted the GATE examination. Now we will let David apply the silver bullet to TOEFL and obtain a great score. Unlike some leading Oxford dons who with a straight face tolerate all ex-colonial English, on which incidentally the sun does not set, some people give weightage to TOEFL. Now with David's score in TOEFL we cannot say David knows English. It is however guaranteed that he is an expert in knowing what is not English. This does not normally happen as TOEFL is a well planned examination
TECHNICALLY AUDITING A GATE SHOP
The properties of the silver bullet shows that the public and student have a tool to audit a GATE shop or a shop claiming to give instruction/coaching for a competitive examination. A student, even if of mediocre capability, should effectively be able to solve a randomly selected sample of legacy questions, if the coaching/training is effective. An audit of the faculty labour is the extent to which they can solve and impart instruction to the student in confidently and correctly solving the legacy question papers.

PART II
FOR SOCIETY: THE UNSAVOURY PATH TO FAILURE
”....it was the worst of times…..we are all going direct the other way……”

GATE AND THE PROBLEM WITH IT
However over the last ten years, barring perhaps 2003 A.D., the standard of the GATE examination has rapidly plummeted down. It has become easier over the years to qualify in GATE. The reasons for the fall in the standard are conjectured below.
This perhaps is in line with the steady degeneration witnessed in most engineering education over the last decade in India. This education now seems more oriented towards turning out cheap semi-skilled labour, on a mass scale, as a national herd mentality movement.
THE OUTSOURCING SCENARIO
All this for catering to the oversold and over hyped chimera of the uncertain, internationally highly competitive, outsourced IT (& progressively other areas) market of the high wage countries. The major hype is oriented especially to the SWITCH(1) group of companies and the MNC development centers, and the long tail of the IT outsourcing industry. This ignores the fact that most of the work of IT-labour and in general all outsourcing labour, are in the lower level activities of the software life cycle and the business process, respectively. The aura is with the fascinating bubble of easy money (by local economic standards) and its associated lifestyle from the seemingly endless bubble of progressively lucrative job and wage advancement and opportunities. We seem to have forgotten the competition from the Third Word and the other BRIC(2) countries forming as storm clouds on the horizon. They will do the same work at much more economical rates. Perhaps even an order of magnitude lower than now may be the difference in wages and burdened costs, in the not too distant future, as the Global Village fully dawns upon the Third World(3). As a case in point consider the Olympics opening & closing ceremony, as to what would happen if the vast, untapped, economically backward, intellectually competent, deep interiors of the Third World are plummeted into the Global Village and outsourcing market(4).
GATE AND OUTSOURCING
It is an interesting and ludicrous situation that we can have a valid thesis that for over a decade the quality of the GATE examination and the demand for the same from the student community, varies inversely with the quantity of demand for IT-labour and outsourcing labour made by the high wage countries on India.
The rise of the GATE standard, a radical increase in the demand for the GATE examination by aspiring students and a mushrooming of GATE coaching institutions, was noticed when there was a major slump in the demand for IT-labour after the Y2K boom in India, and the almost simultaneously occurring dot com bust in the Silicon Valley.
The downfall of the GATE standard, and collapse of many coaching institutes whose business model was cash over content, was witnessed steadily in pace with the exponential growth of the outsourcing opportunities over the last five years, with the GATE 2008 question papers being uniformly fecund with bloomers.
Now in 2008 A.D., at the height of the demand for IT-labour, coaching institutions which survived the crash were those that invested in some semblance of content plus cash. The GATE examination quality is now at a low ebb. It is just the variation and metamorphosis of a standard bagful of questions on a narrow spectrum of selected topics. In recent question papers a sufficiently large bulk of questions, to ensure glorious success, can be easily and rapidly solved, by suitably instructed mediocre students, using a standard collection of tricks, methods, techniques and stunts applied using a definite process.
THE GATE SHOPS: BUSINESS MODEL
GATE coaching shops have developed to take advantage of this situation. They follow the proven tradition and business model that most commercial training and coaching institutions have followed in India. This business paradigm peaked during the national bubble of the computer software training era. This when computers were either nonexistent or notoriously scarce commodities. Real know-how, in industrial strength IT of the high wage countries, little or nonexistent. This was both in the public and private sectors and the gold rush was on. The gold rush was evidently initially created by the high wage countries when contemplating the cost of maintaining their stockpile of legacy software. The next gold rushes were the Y2K problem, the labor for the dot com boom and the international outsourcing movement.
During the Y2K bubble hordes of persons, paying exorbitant fees, were trained on the IBM mainframe, without anyone involved having a ghost of an idea as to what the mainframe was all about. Certified poor souls who rushed off to the high wage countries after the training were actually trained by some kind souls there.
During the IT training bubble of the nineties, a little bit of programming instuction augmented by a little bit of IT knowledge was taken. This was encapsulated in a lifestyle of consumerism that liberalisation and globalisation made possible. The sugary ecapsulated product along with unlimited and round the clock access to the personal computer was the product marketed with a lot of hype by training shops and sold to hordes of people at enormous cost.
The pattern followed by the GATE shops is by now a very familiar story. It was developed over the last three decades. The pattern, it is emphasized, was in a vacuum of knowledge in the industrial strength IT of high wage countries. This pattern applies to most software training attempts by small, medium or large shops, businesses or corporations, whether in the private or public sector. The pattern was and is even today some sort of a national industrial disease and applies to all the actors. However it makes proven sound marketing sense in all the businesses. The shops following the pattern charge exorbitant fees, an order of magnitude more than what is reasonable. They are ostensibly backed and/or staffed by noted personalities, dormant educationists, leading social service and government organisations of impeccable standing and have exclusive access to imaginary high quality experienced industry professionals, and noted faculty of the higher tier educational institutions. They ostensibly have shortly to be formalized links with leading or reputed national and international educational institutions for faculty and accreditation. They claim that with their proven expertise and experience, and in accordance with the near wishes of their heart, and a lifetime aim, their shops will shortly spawn formal educational institutions of repute, in the memory of a near departed soul. This is the only reason why these noble souls are forced with great reluctance to accept money from the students as fees. If very successful they all at the end of their boom period enter the commercial education racket in formal education. They expend enormous time and energy in both free and paid manipulated gaudy publicity in all forums, public places and media. They have lists of real &/or manipulated &/or imaginary performance in previous years in terms of rank holders. They have a small library of easily available text books. In some business cases of large corporations the students are ostensibly free to use the inaccessible large corporate library and profit form the guidance of an inaccessible large corporate pool of technical specialists. These are needless to say imaginary promises. They are well stocked with shoddy student created subject notes and innocently crude mock question papers and question banks. They have a reliable set of minions, who are rigidly controlled wage slaves, for all the umbrella activities of running the show. They have sharp cash based accounting practices common to the grey market if in the small and medium private sector. In the public sector and large private sectors they have sharp accounting practices to bypass the internal and external audit systems. They coolly let drop some the names of their ex-students or ex-employees, who they claim have gone to the high wage countries. They claim that these ex-students and ex-employees are among the crown jewels of MNCs. They flaunt the address of a motel in some high wage country and claim it is their international office for their shortly exploding international IT activities. They all claim to be dedicated social workers and philanthropists, with mindsets far above the concept of gain and make no mention of the bulging sacks of hard cash hidden away in their gowdowns. A crucial difficulty large training and coaching shops, with exploding business, have always had is to acquire a permanent premises, either in their name or in benami names, either registered or notarised, without which they are easily subject to blackmail. As per of the business model they all strive very hard to convert their faculty to wage slaves or economic control/dependence. In most training and coaching centers controlled and run by the private or franchised by the public sectors standard complaints by partners, faculty and staff are made in connection with the attempts to renege on promises made with respect to monies payable.
In the business model, the GATE shops, like the software training shops and all coaching shops, have smooth talking consultants. These persons either implicitly use the projected image of the shop/institution or explicitly brinwash the raw material of the ever optimistic, eternally easily gullible and believing, eager, wide eyed, young students to an imaginary virtual world of promised instructional excellence, vast knowledge impartation & assimilation, regular tests truly reflecting the unknown real question paper coming after the training period is over and guaranteed rosy cheeks when they will ultimately see their GATE examination results.
The aim is to make the student part with the cash and for this any story or promise is in order. In reality, just like the commercial software training attempts by teaching shops and even large and reputed public and private sector institutions, they use precocious students & GATE qualified ex-students, at low wages, as faculty. They use, at more reasonable wages, augmented cycle shop quality histrionic faculty. The collect the students in herds with some sound systems and semblance of teaching aids.
Some GATE shops have no technical model. They take the business risk of collecting a crowd of students, imparting some instruction and relying on luck. Hopefully some bright students should exist in a crowd who will obtain ranks in GATE. This relies on the random distribution of brightness in the student community. This success, if it occurs, will justify the business process of the GATE shop and allow it to grow. Such shops have not gone far. A technical model is needed and successful GATE shops have a well developed model.
THE GATE SHOPS: BUSINESS MODEL REVISTED
In the teething period the GATE shop may require the stick and multiple carrot approach with respect to faculty to aid the isolation of the topics in any particular area and some semblance of solutions to the legacy GATE question papers. This is a usual feature in the business model of the training and coaching institutions. Once the topics are isolated, shoddy notes created on them and the know-how in approximate solutions of low quality to the legacy question papers is gained, the faculty are replaced by ex-students as faculty at a fraction of the wages.
This allows the GATE shop to build a reusable standard model of a shop. Then it can diversify into branches in various urban areas in the country. Some have done this at the height of the demand for GATE from the student community.
There is however a great drawback in that the system has a flaw. It is not so easy to solve the entire set of legacy questions without a couple of years of experience in the subject or sustained indepth effort. Alternatively the student has to put in sustained effort in the solution spots highligted by a reverse mapping from the legacy questions. Mastery of the principles is essential. It is a one thing to solve all the questions and a completely different matter to instruct a mediocre student to do it unilaterally. The training in the silver bullet is essential.
REJUVENATING GATE
The fluctuation in the GATE standard has to be attended to. Continued success in the GATE examingation over the last few years in coaching medicore students by the hundreds shows a negative trend in the standard. It is high time the older IITs & IISc stop unilaterally blaming the sharp business acumen oriented GATE shops, which in their own way and style do a social service. They should wake up like Kumbhakarna on their somnolescent pedestals. They should restructure their GATE syllabus. The should put in some dedicated time and effort to redo the content and standard of the GATE examination. In standard of evaluation it should be invariant with respect to whatever geometric spaces the IT-labour and other outsourcing labour demands from the high wage countries may be in. They should bring it to the lines of respectability that the entrance examination for undergraduate studies has always commanded.

NOTES:-
(1)SWITCH---Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL. These companies are among the few that have mastered the art of maintaining large software. This is not everybody's cup of tea. Small and medium companies that tried the game have failed. However, the hard work ethic and sharp business practices these companies have followed to acquire the knowhow can possibly be rapidly replicated by some other determined low wage country or environment, even if starting with zero IT knowhow.
(2)BRIC---Brazil, Russia, India and China. Wages of US$70K per year for a job in a high wage country translates in outsourcing to a job with wages of INR Rs.60,000/- per month in India and the BRIC countries.
(3)During the aftermath of the dot com bust and preceding the outsourcing boom wages of INR RS.5,000/- to Rs.10,000/- per month were considered to be good in the secondary IT industry. In such a situation the consumerist lifestyle has to be abandoned or radically curtailed.
(4)The vast interiors of India are still not in the Global Village. However,the cell phone seems to have however penetrated into the deep interiors.

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