IIT Bhilai Admission Experience for M.Tech 2020

This year due to the pandemic many IITs are not able to conduct face to face interview and thus are shifting dates due to lock-down. IIT Bhilai is one of the new IITs which is conducting the interview via Skype. I got this opportunity by qualifying the Gate Exam with a decent score and after I applied for M.Tech in IIT Bhilai I got shortlisted for the interview.

The interview was scheduled in the morning session and it was of only one round. The interview panel consist of 3 people(lets say them P, Q, R). Just before the Interview a demo call  was placed by a volunteer where my Identity was verified and after that the main interview call arrived. It lasted for around 20 to 25 minutes. Roughly the interview questions  were about the grasp of your technical subjects which you feel you are good at. So let me share my experience of the interview.

Questions asked by professor P:

• Tell me about yourself: Answer in brief about your background, academics qualification, achievements if any etc.
• What are your favorite subjects? ( I answered C programming, Data Structures and Algorithms, Discrete Mathematics)

Question asked by Professor Q:

• Explain the concept of NP-Hard
• Give an example of NP-Hard problem
• What is the difference between NP-complete and NP-Hard
• What is the full form of NP

After these questions Professor P switched to different Algorithm techniques(Divide and Conquer, Greedy Algorithm, Dynamic Programming)

Questions asked by Professor P:

• What is the difference between Dynamic programming and Divide and Conquer Technique?(I told one difference though it was important but they expected more)
• Give an Example of Greedy Algorithm(I said Huffman Coding)
• Explain any one of the Greedy Algorithm in detail(He focused mainly on easy algorithms but I requested to be specific and then they asked about Minimum Spanning Tree).
• Is minimum weighted edge included in MST?
• Is maximum weighted edge included in MST?
• How will prove that minimum weighted edge is included or not in MST?(They expected me to approach with proof techniques such as proof by contradiction but I was not able to explain)

After this Professor R asked about my knowledge on Operating System and then asked few question on them.

Questions asked by Professor R:(first he asked my strong portion in OS)

• In segmentation if there are 16 segments and Virtual Address is of 32 bits then how many number of bits present for offset?
• Tell me about second chance page replacement algorithm.
• What is the difference between single level paging and multilevel paging?
• What is the increase in the number of page access if used Linear paging and if we use 2-Level Paging ?
• Are you familiar with Linux?(I said I am not though it was in our B.Tech course but since it was not in Gate Syllabus so I was not confident about it)
• Do you know about Least Recently Used(LRU) Algorithm? Where it is used?
• In page replacement algorithm if LRU is the only algorithm you have to use then how would you know the least used page if you have to swap in and swap out pages?

This was the last question of the interview and with this I greeted the panel and the wished me luck. Currently I am waiting for the result. Hope this experience is worthy.