70% of international engineering students in US from India, China

Seventy per cent of international students studying engineering in the US are from China and India, according to a new report. 

"SEVIS by the Numbers," a quarterly report of international students studying in the US, was released yesterday by the student and exchange visitor program (SEVP), part of the US immigration and customs enforcement's (ICE) homeland security investigations (HSI). 

As of July 8, 9,66,333 international students were enrolled in nearly 9,000 US schools using an F (academic) or M (vocational) visa. 

This marks a nearly five per cent decrease from April, primarily due to graduation rates, but an eight percent increase when compared to July 2013. 

The July report included a special section that focuses on China. 

According to it, seventy-five percent of all international students were from Asia, with 28 per cent from China. 

As of July 8, there were 2,70,596 international students from China studying in the US. The majority of these students studied in California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois. 

The report further said that nearly 3,50,000 international students pursued STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) coursework in July. 

Sixty-nine per cent of international students studying STEM fields were male. Eighty-five per cent of international students studying STEM coursework are from Asia. 

Seventy per cent of international students studying engineering are from China and India. More international students study engineering than any other STEM field of study, it said. 

South Korea and Vietnam had the greatest percentage decrease in students studying in the US at eight per cent and seven per cent, respectively, when compared to April figures. 

The top 10 countries of citizenship for international students included: China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil. 

The University of Southern California, Purdue University, the University of Illinois, New York University and Columbia University rank one through five among US schools with the most international students. 

The report is based on data from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based system that includes information on international students, exchange visitors and their dependents while they are in the US. 

A school must be SEVP-certified before it can enroll international students. 

SEVP monitors approximately one million international students pursuing academic or vocational studies (F and M visa holders) in the US and their dependents. It also certifies schools and programmes that enroll these students.

Original source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/70-of-international-engineering-students-in-US-from-India-China-Report/articleshow/39737684.cms

Boring lectures in classrooms cause more failures, lesser grades

Classroom lectures cause more students to fail compared to interactive sessions involving discussions and problem solving in science, engineering and math courses, a new study in the US has found. Interactive sessions, also called 'active learning', improve exam performance too.

Those findings are from the largest and most comprehensive analysis ever published of studies comparing lecturing to active learning in undergraduate education, said Scott Freeman, a University of Washington principal lecturer in biology. He's lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of May 12.

Freeman and his co-authors based their findings on 225 studies of undergraduate education across all of the "STEM" areas: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The researchers found that 55 per cent more students fail lecture-based courses than classes with at least some active learning.

On average across all the studies, a little more than one-third of students in traditional lecture classes failed — that is, they either withdrew or got Fs or Ds, which generally means they were ineligible to take more advanced courses. On average, with active learning, a little more than one-fifth of students failed.

"If you have a course with 100 students signed up, about 34 fail if they get lectured to but only 22 fail if they do active learning, according to our analysis," Freeman said. "There are hundreds of thousands of students taking STEM courses in U.S. colleges every year, so we're talking about tens of thousands of students who could stay in STEM majors instead of flunking out every year."

Attempts by college faculty to use active learning, long popular in K-12 classrooms, started taking off in the mid-1990s, Freeman said, though lecturing still dominates.

"We've got to stop killing student performance and interest in science by lecturing and instead help them think like scientists," he said.

Regarding grade improvement, the findings showed improvements on exams increased an average of 6 per cent, which might raise students half a grade, for example from a B+ to an A.

If the failure rates of 34 per cent for lecturing and 22 per cent in classes with some active learning were applied to the 7 million US undergraduates who say they want to pursue STEM majors, some 2.38 million students would fail lecture-style courses vs 1.54 million with active learning. That's 840,000 additional students failing under lecturing, a difference of 55 percent compared to the failure rate of active learning.

original source : Times of India 

Saad Nasser: The Stanford qualified, 11 year old, wonder kid who is pursuing computational neurosciences

Saad Nasser, 11, is a little out of place. In a room full of adults, sitting in the expansive office of Sam Pitroda at the Yojana Bhavan in Delhi, he is uncomfortable with the attention. His delicate fingers fiddle with the Intel IRIS Fair award he is barely able to hold. "How does it feel," somebody asks. He just smiles with his bright curious eyes. He is not grown up enough to answer such complex questions. 

But he switches track easily. "What was the project Saad that won you the Intel prize?" asks Pitroda. Nasser is immediately transformed. His eyes light up. "As processors keep getting bigger and bigger, wire delays begin to cause problems. Traditional ISAs hide wire delays in multiple microarchitectural ways, including pipelining etc, which complicates the design and increases power...," he begins with ease and spontaneity that stuns everybody in the room. 

IRIS stands for Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science, a research-based science outfit for which the Department of Science and Technology, industry lobby CII and Intel have come together to encourage a young generation of innovators. National winners of Intel IRIS will represent India at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. So Nasser is all set to make a trip to Los Angeles — the venue of the fair — in May.

Nasser is a child. Yet he is unlike others of his age. When he was 1, he did not play with toys. Instead, he wanted to look inside toy cars and gadgets. At 2, he was neatly unscrewing all his toys and gadgets to satiate his curiosity for what's inside. At 5, he was reading his dad's books on Java programming. At 7, he had finished a book on C++. Last year, he finished Stanford's online courses on databases and cryptography. He is currently doing online courses on statistics, circuits and electronics and computational neurosciences from Udacity, MIT and University of Washington.

Last month, he also won the Intel IRIS Fair award. His project was judged the best submitted by school students across the country. "He is a genius. The course he is doing at MIT is a pretty tough one," says Pitroda, currently adviser to the PM on public information infrastructure and innovations, and chairman of the National Innovation Council.

original source : Economic Times