IIT-Madras offers academic flexibility to students

Chennai: The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) has announced that it was offering an academic flexibility to the student sthat was unrivalled, even among the IITs.

A release from IIT-M said students have the freedom to choose nearly 50 per cent of the courses that they will be studying, with only some restrictions.

Out of the electives, students were free to choose about eight courses (called ‘Free Electives’) from any of the 16 departments of IIT-Madras as well as other approved institutions.

The students could get 72 credits from pursuing courses as diverse as ‘History of India,’ ‘Psychology’ and ‘Economics’ to ‘Artificial intelligence’ and ‘Machine Learning.’

‘If a student chooses four such courses in one contiguous area, they will be conferred a minor in that field. For example, if a student chooses four courses in economics, IIT-M will confer a Minor in Economics to that student’, it said.

Prof V Jagadeesh Kumar, Dean (Academic Courses), IIT-M said, ‘I do not think any other IITs offers the academic flexibility being provided to students by IIT-Madras. Students can have fun and earn credits too.’

‘For example, if a student is interested in building things and builds a robot, the student can avail credits for the same. Students can earn as much as 36 credits in all departments, with certain departments even offering up to 48 credits for such activities’, he said, adding, this was not part of a class, but something done
for fun and if it clicks, it could be converted to credits under the IIT-Madras system.

On ‘Branch Change’ option at the end of a semester being dispensed with from this academic year, he said this was not an impediment.

‘IIT Madras admits about 1,300 students and only about 25 to 30 students get a branch change. So, the probability of a student getting a branch change is really small. On the other hand, a student in the fourth or fifth semester can upgrade to a large number of interdisciplinary programs, ranging from fields like nanotechnology, biomedical engineering, computational engineering, data science,
energy system, robotics and Quantum Science.’

A new specialization on Dynamical Systems recently will soon be added. This year, nearly 200 students have upgraded to such
specializations, which was large numbers when compared with the branch change students.

More such specializations will be added by IIT-Madras, Prof Jagadeesh Kumar said.