With about a half a decade of experience of intensive teaching to students who prepare rigorously for competitive exams and my personal review of exams papers of more than a decade, I always wonder that, do we really need a drastic change in the pattern of entrance exams? And I realized that its an urgent need in national and probably international interest. For me, the very purpose of entrance exams also seems to be little vague and unclear, as most universities and premier institutes of the country, are screening the better candidates, who according to them represent creamy layer. For an employer or a company its fine to screen and exam and interview candidates, as they need to select as per their needs, but why do educational institutes select students, they are not meant for that. Rather, they are meant for uplifting the poorest student. It’s a bias that they pick up a few and leave the majority of students behind. Is that the real purpose of our educational establishments! Don’t we need to groom those students who are actually keen to learn rather than compete with others, don’t we really need to take care of the weakest student who never got an opportunity to learn from best but has enough potentials as others? But, this doesn’t seem to be fulfilled anywhere from the current system of entrance exams. Here is a personal viewpoint in this blog post.
Why this rats race?
If the purpose of educational institutes is to perform educational upliftment of the nation, do we have a system which brings across really weak students (not in terms of income, or caste or creed, but in terms of poor education) into premiere institutes? A student must give an entrance exam to enter into the best institutes and this brings him into a rat’s race just after the K12, which becomes the sole purpose of education for him as well as his parents. If they don’t succeed the probability of getting a better career opportunity is highly reduced. Rather than learning the very basic reason for each and every concept, students merely focus on a goal of qualifying one exam after other and this goes up to the highest academic degree, Ph.D. This not only creates a sense of failure in the students and decreases the morale of students to a great extent.
Imagine a competitive exam after class 12th where more than 10 lac students appear and merely 10,000 get good institutes, which means nearly 99% of students consider themselves failed. Is this the success of our educational institutions, which they pick up 0.1 % of students and groom them. What about the remaining 99%, who holds the responsibility, they either become the victim of private establishments or live an enigma of failing in an exam.
Do these exams support the last student in the queue?
As stated above, if these competitive exams pick up the top 1-10% of the students from a crowd, what about the last person in the queue. Should he always struggle, because he could not get a good institution, because he could not get good guidance and where should he ultimately go? Is it not the responsibility of good educational establishments to consider those students as well? Moreover, there is no system of tracking the performance of a student who ranked first in an exam and one who ranked last in an exam after a decade or so?
Do we really know what students who cracked the exams and joined the best institute of the country actually solved the purpose of establishment, or did he merely opt to go abroad and do something which was nothing to do with the country or In fact the course he attended?
Should we not look and compare the profiles of students in real time who were divided by the thin boundary of entrance exams, and may the one who did not qualify the exam performed much better than one who got top ranks. In that condition shouldn’t the institute provide recognition to the failed student? It might seem tricky and challenging to do, but in the age of information technology and social media, it is very much possible. Nevertheless, every institute can reserve some seats for students who failed in an exam but had enough potential to perform (Maybe some will argue that this why we have entrance exams, but I still disagree as most exams don’t test the curiosity and eagerness, but the mere factual accumulation of data and numerical ability)
Are we making students mind a data repository?
Another important and questionable aspect of many (but not all) exams is that there is a large number of factual questions in the exam. As an example, I saw a question in an exam that what is the number of genes in the human genome? I don’t think that’s a perfect question (as the initial predicted number was 30,000, then later it was revised several times to much lower value), and many more such examples exist where facts and values are asked in exams (how many bones do we have in our body), which are irrelevant.
Oh come on! In this age of information technology, even a layman can speak to Google and get the answer immediately. Does that really check the knowledge? In fact that’s not knowledge, its just data and information, which is readily available with machines, we are humans and exams should be evaluating the intellect rather than memory (we not being screened for becoming a memory device), which can be done by judging the analytical problem-solving abilities.
So I believe such factual questions should be completely forbidden for exams and students must not be forced to mug up any data or any value which is readily available.
Do we need to check the curiosity and motivation?
This is a big question that must be implemented to bring the much better outcome of education and its upliftment. In fact, may international organization do this at the level of higher education (In facts some institutes in India like IISER, TIFR, etc. have begun and its really a matter of appreciation). Most exams which are based on mere MCQs or answering a few hundred questions can never check the real talent, and more importantly curiosity and motivation of a student to join the specific institute.
Questions like, why you want to join the said course, or institute? What is the motivation behind choosing the said course? And what is your career goal? Must be included as the part of the testing scheme and must be evaluated by highly skilled teams that must include passionate professionals and psychologists.
In fact some advanced computational tools can be made to evaluate such questions. This will not only bring the better and highly motivated candidates but also eliminate the winners of a rat race who may even not wish to work on the area which they opted after qualifying the exam. This becomes much important when the selection is being made for the highest degree courses or research. Majority of entrance examinations for masters level and research do not include these criteria at present (but almost followed everywhere in developed nations).
And finally, the question remains very much open that are we just bringing more and more students into the rat's race every year and then, crushing the talent in this heavy stampede! Can we do something to lift those weak but motivated students and can we groom them to bring much larger and much broader growth in education? Although it's not possible to end the exams completely in countries like India, which are highly populated and there must be a system of screening.
Note: This blog post represents a personal viewpoint of the author and written with no intention of defaming any organization or establishments. Comments and suggestions are welcome.