Clarifications on Hindustan Times coverage of Senior Survey

Hindustan Times covered our Senior Survey recently. You can view the article here, or see the snippet below.

For the benefit of readers, we’d like to post clarifications on some potentially misleading statements in the article:

1.”More than half (56.7%) final year students of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (IIT-B) said the primary reason for not attending classes regularly was that lectures were monotonous. Around 50.8% said they didn’t feel like they learnt anything from classes.” These percentages refer to only those students to whom the question was relevant i.e. those who, given the choice, would have attended classes rarely or not at all, which were 120 of the 259 respondents.

2. “Nine out of 10 (92.8%) admitted using unfair practices for assignments, the least cheating happened during semester examinations.” The actual figure is 92.8% of the 54.7% of respondents who admitted to some form of dishonesty, and not of the entire sample of 259.

3. “More than 45% of the students said the quality of teachers was poorer than expected.” The relevant question asked about students’ satisfaction with their department: for around 45% students, the entire department experience, of which teaching quality is but a part, did not meet their expectations.

As one of the country’s leading newspapers, we hope HT will make these changes at the earliest. While the original web article has since been taken down, we do hope they issue a notification to their readers about these, since the article has been widely read since publication. We think that such statements misrepresent the truth in the minds of readers and undermine our efforts, and are hoping for them to act on this as soon as is possible.

The analysis and detailed results of the survey can be found here: http://gymkhana.iitb.ac.in/~insight/senior-survey/