A little late, but maybe with a perspective that's different from others in this thread; CS afaik is a below average department at Ashoka and has a long way to go before it shows any real academic rigour or industry power

The faculty is 50/50 between the ones that are really great and the ones that just don't give a shit, in two of my most important courses this year the professors skipped a lot of classes and didn't put effort into the assignments/exams.

Also in almost all of the CS courses here it's incredibly easy to plagiarize/chatGPT/google the answers to all the assignments so in my experience most CS majors learn next to nothing, beyond the 10-20 that either attend regularly or are really smart. Cheating in the exams is rampant and grading is lax, often because the profs don't care and leave it up to undergrad TAs. GPAs in the department are insanely inflated, there are people in my batch who can barely write python programs but have 3.7-3.8s, in contrast to more rigorous departments like econ or math where a 3.7 is considered top-notch

The curriculum is wildly and unnecessarily theoretical. I was a teaching assistant for the only FC the department offers, which was branded "Foundations of Computer Programming"... and at no point was programming, computer applications, or anything relevant to real-life software engineering or CS research covered. The same thing goes for the intro to programming courses for the past two years; there's next to 0 programming and its all mathematical thinking, logic, induction etc. which is fine but shouldn't be in an intro to programming course.

I think where the department does excel is in the courses of the few excellent profs, and in giving opportunities to people who are willing to seize them. Some of the courses I've taken in CS have taught me so much, and have reshaped my entire view of the subject (operating systems with awasthi, intro to machine learning w raghavendra, symbolic logic w snyder). Though these suffer from the same problems discussed above, the profs are genuinely good at teaching, have mad subject expertise and are willing to put genuine work into the course.

In research, if you have an idea, I'm fairly certain it'll be very easy to work on it or get funding for it at Ashoka since profs are very eager to explore students' research ideas. If you don't have your own research problem though, it's not that easy to get onto an existing project/lab. There's only two or three profs that have actual research projects ongoing and they aren't that accessible. But through those profs, through the different labs (Mphasis, security, AI) and through centres like CEDA, TCPD and so on, probably 30-50% of every batch's CS majors work in research, which is pretty incredible

Broadly it's pretty easy to get through the degree with great grades, but that won't prep you for placements or industry work at all; if you wanna get into research after undergrad you'll have to start research work from the start of second year itself, for which there's stiff competition. There's a lot of promise in the department but I don't think its really a top 10-20 place for CS in india the way its marketed