Less than 5% of Indian engineering students are fit for techie jobs

India is seen abroad as a place that produces high-caliber tech talent, and there’s good reason for that. But it hides a dark side: most of the engineers being churned out by the thousands of colleges in India are not even employable. The ones who come to the limelight are mostly the cream from premier colleges like the IITs.

It says over 36,000 engineering students from IT-related departments of more than 500 colleges took an automated test using machine learning.

The study says that only 4.77 percent of those who took the test were assessed to be employable in software development jobs. Two-thirds of the tested students could not even write code that compiles.

Test methodology

The 10-year-old Aspiring Minds provides assessment and certification services to global clients like Amazon, Microsoft, GE, and Coca Cola. 

For the assessment of engineering students in this study, it used a tool called Automata. Candidates write solutions to programming problems which can be executed in a simulated compiler.

Simpler tests grade solutions on the basis of the percentage of test cases where the code works, and do not look at the candidate’s thought process. Aspiring Minds says its ML-based test score has a Pearson correlation of 0.85 with that of an expert interviewer’s score, compared to 0.6 for a regular test score.

But it’s the first time that less than 5 percent of students were found employable in such a big sample size of 36,000 students from 500 colleges. One caveat on the study is that even 5 percent of the engineers who graduate in India is a large number – but it does show the increasing inadequacy of most colleges.

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