JEE — The bane of education
Not just JEE, but nearly all the exams (into undergraduate courses) that the National Testing Agency serves must be abolished in order to even attempt implementing the NEP 2020 or any school reform. These are the exact reason why schools cannot risk doing the right thing. Alternate-schools that strive to do the right thing clearly issue disclaimer on JEE-like readiness.
The problem with these entrance exams are twofold:
- They force students to dismiss learning for a narrow focus of cracking the test (recent articles around coaching institutes and shell-schools reveal the inevitable result)
- They hide the inadequacies of the institutes employing these tests in actually delivering on their promise (e.g. most of the graduates aren’t even motivated to remain in engineering and are largely unemployable https://www.shl.com/en-in/resources/by-type/whitepapers-and-reports/national-employability-report-engineers-2019/)
The Joint Entrance Exam (paper 1 & 2) has a very narrow view of admission-worthiness. This view — of being able to crack a bunch of Physics-Chemistry-Mathematics (PCM) problems in a time-constrained testing manner — is neither the core ability that is being developed in the Indian Institutes of Technology — IITs — (or in other 4000+ engineering colleges in India) nor the requirement of the industry for which these engineers are being prepared! All that the institutes test is the ability of students to cram on patterns of problem solving. These aren’t (provably) engineer-material. They are students who have developed the smarts to solve some esoteric PCM problems. They are generally smart enough to work their way to cracking crosswords, Sudoku or any known fixed family of problems. They are also typically hardworking. This combination & NOT the JEE outcome is sufficient to make anything of these young kids.
The only thing that the JEE achieve is make the job easy for the IITs (and NITs and others). Without having to invest much or even using their collective brain, the IITs simply pick the top 5K (though the official count of seats in the IITs is about 16K, the ones at Madras, Bombay, Kharagpur, Kanpur & Delhi are the truly coveted ones) students. 5K from about 900K students appearing for the JEE. Institutes that claim to be so wonderful should have the ability to “teach” a moderately intelligent student to become an engineer of worth (esp. if s/he is anyway unlikely to remain in engineering). To take the cream and make them marginally creamier can surely be managed by any private firm.
I won’t go into the mental trauma or the misplaced self-doubt of those who make it or don’t (both students suffer), or the disease of coaching institutes or the debt that families get into or the degradation of learning and education.
I am convinced that the only way to attempt any school or educational reform is to shutdown these kinds of exams.
The immediate impact of doing so include:
- Students are no longer preparing for these exams
- The pressure is off everyone’s shoulders
- Schools can focus on designing effective holistic curricula
- NEP 2020 (or any other aspirational policy) implementation will indeed be honest
- Students are likely to be more well-rounded
- Coaching institutes can be shutdown and the obscenity of their kinds (as witnessed here, here and here) can be removed from the space of education.
The common response to this is — “Well, JEE will be replaced by some other exam” but that is exactly what we are eradicating. The follow-up is “Then how will the engineering colleges select the correct candidates?” to which the short answer is — “I don’t care. Let them figure it out.” The longer answer follows.
Any test at a particular instance is a poor tool. Consistency trumps a single day’s performance.
If the various education ministries & institutes could get together and craft a list of all possible demonstrations of skill, ability, knowledge, commitment & creativity along with attitudes and dispositions and share this list with the rest of the country, then students have a chance of demonstrating the same over 5–6 years. These demonstrations could include the predictable NTSE and Olympiads but also Science Congress events, Junior Achievement, WRO India, and much more. Credible organisations and their competitions can also be on the list. Publishing in critically reviewed and edited journals/magazines can also be on the list. Microcredentials offered by reputed individuals (e.g. someone like an Arvind Gupta or a Sudarshan Khanna for work done to create toys using scientific principles) or by professionals conducting workshops can also be admitted. Every registered inter-school or intra-school competition (with judges who have no affiliation with the said institutes) can also be admitted. Non-competitive demonstrations (e.g. documenting the Olive Ridley turtles movement along the coast of Odisha, or contributing to the Indian Bird Song database) should actually be given significant weight, IMO. Certifications (from reputed institutes) in operating the lathe, wheel alignment, welding, etc. should also be given significant weight. Now that we are thinking clearly, let’s also add social, interpersonal, financial literacy, physical and other kinds of skills to the mix.
Why would I, as an employer or institute of higher education, not want someone who has a healthy childhood vs one who has done nothing other than cram for an exam?
Let us assume that there are 300–400 such opportunities documented (and some can be performed multiple times too) allowing for a student sufficient space and variety to demonstrate them over a course of 5–6 years (organically from, say, grade 5). Against her/his national identification (Aadhaar) or if you prefer a blockchain variant, we could keep tracking her/his investment and commitment to (or mere demonstration of) a line of skill development. Each demonstration earns some points. Each institute of higher education can pick their scoring scheme (e.g. the IITs might give the IRIS National Fair a higher weightage than the AIIMS does) but all of this is known upfront. Now the institute has a score to pick from.
If nothing less than 40% weight is given to consistent performance and nothing more than 10% weight is given to a one-off exam/test/interview, then institutes can specify their preference and students can build their portfolio to that. An SoP could be a video (shot without editing or filters) summarising all that the student has done and an honest appeal to why s/he is a good candidate. Letters of recommendation (LoR) can also be included. Every institute can mark some performance act (except for exams) as their critical indicator (no more than half weight given to consistent performance). It could be paper submissions or participating in a research project over multiple years or something like that, though I would recommend a blend of physical, academic, social (as in, community-related) and attitudinal qualities.
Together, the 1st, 3rd and 5th components (in the proposed scheme above) can create a set of scores that have been constructed over time and with consistency.
This approach works for any stream of higher education. An Indian Statistical Institute might pick items that indicate an inclination towards statistics, data visualisation or something that matters to them. A Tata Institute of Social Studies might have a different list. But by allowing the student at least a hundred different ways of demonstrating their fitness for a course of study over many years, we are making entrance criteria more pertinent while not disturbing what schools have set out to do.
