Training Rural Students for Premier IIT colleges

The program: Avanti Learning Centers, an award-winning social enterprise set up by IIT Bombay graduates, has partnered with Vidya Poshak to select about 45 bright students from north Karnataka and provide them free training in Class XI and XII for the IIT-JEE. The program will be conducted using technology to bring the expert tutors sessions to Vidya Poshak students as well as peer learning techniques that enable a class to move forward using multitude of skills of students.

Profile of students: Every year Vidya Poshak gets more than 1500 applications for scholarship from 10th grade passed students. In these, at least 40 % have scored more than 90%. These bright kids might aspire to go to premier institutions such as IIT, NIT, IISc etc. but are unable due to lack of guidance and coaching. Vidya Poshak wanted to help such bright but economically challenged students to aim for and get into premier institutions. In the current 2015-17 batch we have a total of 35 students with 10 girl students.  22 of the students are from homes with annual income below INR 2,00,000/- (INR Two Lakhs) . The others are slightly above that limit but not much. Nearly half the students have studied in vernacular medium of instructions till their 10th grade.

Achievements / Journey so far: 

It’s been an interesting journey so far for Vidya Poshak. In order to select the initial set of 39 students, we conducted tests for approximately 400 students. However, a major lesson we learnt was that just the ability to score well does not make an IIT aspirant! Several  of our early students left within two months claiming that the additional burden of IIT coaching was difficult to bear.

Quite a few of our students are from Kannada medium and the instructions in English were hard to follow for them. Consequently they took time to come up to speed even though they were the selected few from hundreds of students who had appeared and failed our assessment test. After six months we are seeing a fantastic transformation in our students. Two of our students scored highest in the first Major Test for 11th grade students across Avanti classes in entire India. 4 of our students were in the 35 students who scored in 150-179 marks range. Today, our batch stands in the top 25 percentile across entire national level classes of 11th grade.

The Future:  Vidya Poshak is thrilled as is Avanti about the success so far of our experiment at Dharwad. We are looking forward to starting a new batch in the academic year 2016-17 that will aim to get into IIT in mid-2018.

Avanti is the brain child of IIT Mumbai alumni, Akshay Saxena and Krishna Ramakumar. Avanti has done incredible work over the past 4 years. They have a passionate, capable team and an innovative teaching methodology.

Avanti’s blended-learning content and technology makes it possible to deliver high-quality affordable coaching even in rural parts of India. Avanti’s classrooms use technology to provide 24/7 access to high-quality online content. This curriculum is augmented by structured peer-to-peer-learning activities and expert tutorial sessions run through live videoconferencing. Since 2011, 50 out of Avanti’s 250 students have qualified the IIT-JEE – a remarkable 20% selection rate. Moreover, more than 200 of these students have got admission to top state engineering colleges. The social impact of Avanti’s work has been recognized by Ashoka, The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Echoing Green and the PanIIT Alumni Organization.

In 2014, Avanti’s top ranker, Vedant Somani got All India Rank (AIR) 36 in the JEE Mains and AIR 319 in the JEE Advanced. Hailing from the rural JNV school system in Telangana, Vedant is now pursuing his computer science degree at IIT Madras. This year, one of Avanti’s students from Kanpur, Ayush Sharma, has been accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA – one of the world’s top universities for engineering. What’s even more exciting is that Ayush has secured a full scholarship amounting to over INR 1 Cr over his four years.

 Update:

The IIT / JEE program is working well in Dharwad at Vidya Poshak. We have 35 students who are aspiring to crack the JEE and get into one of the premiere institutions of India. This is the ticket for their success in career. 

We are conducting 4 classes every week for 3 hours each. The classes are focused on concept of the subject to be covered. This is helpful for the students in their college exams as well as to prepare for the competitive exams.