higher-education on S Anand

AI policies across universities

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:35:09 +0800

I researched the AI policies across 25 universities.

In the last 6 months, I conducted sessions at three of these Universities: IIT Madras, Singapore University of Technology and Design, and Ashoka University.

Interestingly, these are the three lowest ranked universities in my analysis of AI policies.

This is where I’m glad that correlation does not imply causation.

IIM Bangalore PGP Interview Panel

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:42:32 +0530

Yesterday, I was part of an IIM Bangalore interview panel at Hyderabad, along with Professor Subhabrata Das and Debajyoti. Panels typically comprise of two faculty and an alumni, and handle 8 interviews in the morning and eight in the evening, though in our case, we had 9 each.

As we arrived, we were given a USB drive with the student’s resume, statement of purpose, and other documents that they had submitted, which included employment contracts, declarations, letters of recommendation, etc., depending on the student. Each interview was approximately 20 minutes. Luckily, Dr Das set a timer for 18, so we didn’t go too far beyond.

There was practically no time to read the documents before each interview, so I used Claude with the following prompt to suggest questions.

In the context of the below, suggest deep, probing questions that will reveal the suitability of the attached candidate for IIM PGP.

Feel free to search online for additional information about the candidate.

…followed by

The instructions email from IIMB
The attachment in the email
Claude’s earlier advice on how to evaluate candidates based on the above. This included suggestions to:
- Probe for internal consistency: “Your SoP says X but your job history suggests Y. Explain.”
- Probe for authenticity: stuff that coaching can’t teach. (It gave candidate-specific questions.)
- Probe for social sensitivity: “You’re from village X. Where does your aspiration help / hurt whihc segments of your village?”
The candidate’s documents (resume, statement of purpose, etc.)

It helped that there were three panelists. That gave me time to screen the questions and understand the good ones - while others asked their questions.

DISADVANTAGE: You have to spend time reading the questions. Not all questions are great. Hallucinations exist (It said one candidate had a claw-back in their employment contract - they didn’t.)
ADVANTAGE: You pick up little-known stuff. One wrote a monthly salary instead of yearly and didn’t know it. The gaps in the resume, the dips in transcripts, etc. surfaced instantly.

Initially, I just read out some questions.
Then I tried using my own judgement.
Then I went back to Claude’s questions.
It took a while to learn how to use it well.

The interview questions idea came from Claude. It also suggested:

Transcribe real time and pop-up questions. I wish I could and I’m sure it’ll happen soon.
Review scores & transcript with Claude. I did almost exactly that!

I told GitHub Copilot CLI (I had credits) running Claude 4.6 Sonnet (a sensible model):

You are evaluating candidates for the PGP Program at IIM Bangalore.
Read interview-guidelines.md fully to understand the process and criteria.

Then, go through each candidate’s folder. These contain:

notes.md: interview notes

documents.md: documents submitted (converted from the PDF in that folder).

Primarily based on the notes (using documents.md for reference - no need to read PDFs), evaluate all candidates on the criteria mentioned in interview-guidelines.md.

Plan like an expert interview evaluator first. In this context, first think about:

What patterns would an expert in this field check / recognize that beginners would miss?

What questions would an expert ask that a beginner would not know to?

What problems / failures would an expert anticipate that beginners may not be aware of?

How would an expert analyze this? At each step, explain what they are looking for and why.

Document and plan your process in eval-copilot-claude/plan.md.
Then, analyze students (use sub-agents as required) and document your analysis and evaluation in eval-copilot-claude/evaluation.md.

It reviewed all 18 candidates summarizing their background, work-experience, and interview scores along with strengths, concerns, and notable moments, with an evaluation summary.

This serves as a good cross-check, I think. So I told it to:

Compare the ratings against my ratings (and notes) in README.md.
Sort the candidates based on the difference between my ratings vs your (normalized / scaled from 1-10) ratings.
For the biggest differences, analyze the reasons for the differences.
Specifically, what might I have missed in the candidate that I should take a closer look at?
Append this to eval-copilot-claude/evaluation.md.

I ran this on Copilot as well as Claude. We agreed on the best candidate. No question about that. Interesting!

This revealed some interesting observations. I seem to:

Ignore social insensitivity and artistic ability. Most likely because I lack both. Note to self: I’m blind to, and hence devalue, what I’m not good at.
Value genuineness far more than analytics. I rated one candidate with terrible analysis skills as only a marginal reject. Claude rejected them outright. This is true for another candidate, too. But I rejected fakers outright.
I calibrate for preparation. I expect more from those with more experience, with more interview preparation, etc. Not a bad thing - just an observation.

In short:

AI is great for preparation. I should make it easier to feed it context.
AI is great at post-mortems. I need to budget time for this.
AI can help during discussions. I need to figure out the technology for this.

How to pick a course

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

In his article on The Power of the Marginal, Paul Graham suggests (among other things) a way of picking courses at college.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

IIT and IIM grads

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow’s leaders: opinion on IIT/IIM grads by T N Ninan at Business Standard. From his interviews for the Aditya Birla scholarships, and observes that there is a lack of awareness about India among them, and that the real value of the IITs/IIMs is in the selection process, not the education. I disagree on the latter. I think the 4+2 years of intense competition also adds value. The curriculum, however, may or may not.

Open Courseware from MIT

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Open Courseware from MIT will be open to the public on Sep 30th. OCW is a set of MIT-designed courses that will be available online to the public. via MetaFilter

IIMB website changed

Mon, 28 Jan 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The IIM-B website has changed.

Global classroom

Mon, 09 Oct 2000 12:00:00 +0000

The reality of international interaction really came through today in the Mergers & MBOs class. Prof. Paulo Volpin commented that ‘So, eefectively, ve see Germany has a pooor accounting seestem." To which, immediately, a German pounced up and said, “I don’t go with this result,” and proceeded on a defence of why the system was right for Germany. A few other Germans joined in. Poor Prof. Volpin had to make a hasty retreat. Later, when making a similar comment about Belgium, he first clarified: “Are there any Belgians in the class?”

A while later, he gave an example in China. One of his friends, a consultant, told him that the Chinese sometimes picked a well-running company and forced it to go bankrupt, just to show the World Bank that their bankruptcy system was working fine. A Chinese practically shouted out that bankruptcy protection was needed, because otherwise 20,000 labourers would be in the streets, and this stupid consultant obviously was not aware of what really happened, because the Government had lots of bad companies to make bankrupt, so why would they pick a good one?

Today’s case discussion was on a Japanese company called Koito. A Japanese is in our team, and he was often asked to comment on what he felt was the situation. He didn’t speak much in class, really. During the break, he came over to me and said, “You know, I would like to speak much. But I cannot. My English is not very good.” As with most Japanese, his entire education was in Japanese, and while he did have some courses in written English, there were almost none in Japanese.

One of the slides was a comparison of market capitalizations of various countries. India was not found on the list. So the Japanese turned to me, politely, and asked “Where is India?” Naturally, I didn’t feel like telling him that the Bombay Stock Exchange had a market capitalization so small that it wouldn’t have been possible to put it on the table.

Well, so much for globalization!

The standard of class participation is extraordinary, though. For example, when we were discussing the EMI-Warner Music merger that was called of recently, one person commented, “Last week I was talking with a Director of EMI, and he said the reason was such-and-such.” I mean, we have people who’ve actually been involved in some of these deals in class! I feel like a baby when I open my mouth.

But that proved not quite the case, actually. We were discussing the Koito case and I did open my mouth on a couple of occasions. During the break, Prof. Volpin comes up to my desk and says, “So, Anand, you seem to know quite a bit about the Koito case. How come?” I mumbled something about Internet searches. Guess there’s something to be said for IIM-B after all…

LBS vs IIMB

Sat, 07 Oct 2000 12:00:00 +0000

How would I compare LBS against IIM-B so far? Let’s see.

Faculty: LBS probably wins marginally. More famous faculty, more industry experience, better communication. But like I said, marginal.
IT infrastructure: IIM-B wins!
IT management: LBS wins. They manage what they’ve got extremely well.
Companies coming for placement: LBS wins.
Placement process: Debatable. IIM-B definitely has a more student-friendly process.
Library: Books-wise, IIM-B wins. Electronic resources-wise, LBS wins.
Students: Comparable. Too early to tell the difference probably. The point is, however, that everyone in LBS has a lot of work-experience.
Campus: IIM-B wins hands down. I mean, LBS faces Regent’s Park and all that, but it doesn’t really have a campus.
Lecture rooms: LBS wins marginally. Slightly better rooms, better equipment.
Hostel: IIM-B wins. LBS doesn’t have one.
Location: LBS wins. Heart of London.
Exchange programmes: LBS wins.

LBS is ahead, but not by far.

Today, I saw a train coming late for the first time. The British Rail comes to the Ilford station at minutes ending in 3 (11:03, 11:13, etc.) Today, the train was TWO MINUTES late. Two whole minutes. Probably because it was raining. I hear people complain about the punctuality of these trains.

Well, most of the day was spent at the computer center doing assignments. If you want a flavour of what I’m doing, check out my report on Koito, which is about Pickens trying to take over Koito.

LBS experiences

Mon, 02 Oct 2000 12:00:00 +0000

Today was my first class at the London Business School, and I’ve written up my experiences on day 1. I plan to keep updating it.