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.

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.