Recently, I was surprised to see an article by Ajit Ranade, calling for out-of-the-box solutions to the dire situation with respect to the Kota suicides. The cause is clearly the limited number of colleges that Indian parents and students aspire to. Indian parents and students are obsessed with the JEE or NEET because cracking the exam with a good rank means an entry into a top engineering or medical college in India, which essentially means that the student’s life is set (in general). He rightly identifies the issue as the symptom and not the cause. Increasing the number of aspirational colleges requires a major policy shift in higher education including autonomy for existing universities and the liberalisation of the sector to improve existing ones as well as the setting up of new colleges. 

The setting up of two Australian Universities at GIFT City in Gandhinagar is one such example. A policy push is needed to improve the many engineering and medical colleges that already exist. Of course, there are many good private colleges, but they are costlier when compared to IITs, NITs and government medical colleges. Therefore, colleges (private or public) that perform can be incentivized financially allowing for significant upgradation and given more autonomy to ensure that colleges can respond to the trends of today, rather than forcing students to study outdated content to obtain degrees that have very little demand in the market.

However, even if these changes are made, the changes would take many years to counter the pressure that the 20-25 lakh students appearing for JEE & NEET face each year. In the meanwhile, the out-of-the-box solution that Ajit Ranade refers to is the one proposed by Nitin Pai and Ajay Shah in their article, Doing better than a competitive exam. They propose a radical solution: 

“Specifically, we could envision a first level exam, which is not about the things that google knows, out of which the top 200,000 ranks are shortlisted. At the second stage, a random list of 20,000 would be chosen to attend the IITs.”

Clearly it seems that the time for radical solutions has arrived. The above proposed out of box solution is exactly what’s proposed in my book, Reimagining Indian Education in chapter 17, titled “The practical stuff needed to reimagine schooling, pg 221:

“…the entrance exams (for JEE / NEET / CUET and others) should test core concepts and knowledge instead of testing students on content which is college level, as in the case with the AIEEE Mains. The flip side of limited content will be that far more students will ace those exams than the seats available in top colleges. In all such cases, the only fair system that doesn’t add stress to students or perverts the focus of true learning in school is to choose students through a draw of lots from all the eligible candidates.”

When I was writing this chapter in 2019/2020, I wrote it with a lot of trepidation, given the radical nature of the suggested solution. I am glad to find support in the education fraternity. I know that many educationists are also worried that CUET will do to commerce and humanities students, what JEE and NEET have done to science students: push them towards coaching classes and therefore dummy schools, because the entrance exam is going to get tougher and tougher; and when the board marks don’t matter for admissions, then students and parents will very soon realise that the way to get admitted in the top colleges of Delhi University and all the other universities that adopt CUET is through coaching. That’s likely to create another monster.

Unfortunately, the media has hyped starting salaries at IITs and especially the stratospheric salaries of a few exceptional individuals; this fuels the obsession for JEE. While IITians would in general get a better starting salary, it would be very interesting to understand if that gap remains after a few years in the corporate world as compared to those coming from other colleges. My guess is that the gap would be quite small as performance is what matters the most and success at work has very little to do with academic performance or background in general. An article titled, “Coaching industry is toxic”, written by an IITian who studied at Kota makes a similar claim and goes on to say that the kind of preparation and environment that exists stops the growth of an individual’s personality.

The JEE & NEET are so tough because they are meant to eliminate most students from contention and rank the remaining. The questions asked in these exams have very little to do with whether the student actually has the right attributes to become a good engineer or doctor. An example of one such typical question from the JEE may involve solving for the mass-acceleration equation in a 3-pulley system; I can guarantee very few students appearing for the JEE have either built or even operated a single pulley system, let alone a three-pulley system. 

Dr. Krishna Kumar, a former director of NCERT, writes in this critique, Kota machine exposes underbelly of education, that the decision-makers at the IITs know that the current format of JEE is not an effective way to spot the right talent for creative engineering. The former Director of IIT Delhi, Prof. Ramgopal Rao says about the JEE:

“The JEE exam is tough. By 1 or 2 marks, the rank can go down by thousands. However tough you may set the exam, at the end of the day, with the kind of preparation that students come with… it’s difficult to make it even tougher. If you make it any simpler, students will score full marks. The JEE exam is an example of supply and demand. The exam is designed to eliminate people or to reject candidates, not to select them. So it is tricky and complicated.”

However, the IITs stick to this mass testing format because of its mechanical nature. As there’s no subjectivity in the marking process, the results can’t be challenged.

While I would say, a hands-on test of scientific skills or mathematical problem-solving in real life situations would be fantastic to select the right engineering talent, but given the high stakes, such a subjective system would not work; massive corruption and litigation would ensue. So there’s no running away from a standardised entrance examination. However, what if the standardised exam were to test basic knowledge and problem solving skills. These questions could focus on application  / competency based responses rather than the need to memorise any content or formula. Given the advent of the internet and Google search, the need to memorise logarithmic values or complex formulae for a test is completely out of place, and even more so now in the age of Generative AI.

Therefore, to ensure that such a test doesn’t become a tool to eliminate or rank students, the test should be based on skills and competencies limited to the core concepts of the necessary subjects and their application rather than complex questions which have no relevance to real life applications or questions that rely on the students ability to memorise facts, information or formulae. The test could be made open-book (maybe fully open-book, or perhaps allow students to bring in 2 pages of reference material) and all the necessary formulas and essential values can be provided, thereby eliminating any need for memorization. For anyone horrified by this suggestion, please do keep in mind that all real science, technology and medicine being done in the real world doesn’t require the practitioners to memorise information. Asking students to solve essentially solved problems, doesn’t help us find the student who’s creative and motivated at finding problems to real world issues.

Much of the content that’s currently expected in JEE is actually well beyond high school curriculum; so in reality the job of teaching that content should lie with the colleges that students go to, rather than forcing that content upon high school students. Therefore, it’s very important that this test doesn’t add on complexity but tests relevant aptitude like the SAT does, so that most students will be able to study for the same on their own, and even if coaching institutes involved, the skills they teach are relevant to real life and creative engineering rather than solving complex problems that exist only on paper. All the students crossing this threshold can be entered into a luck draw system and the draw of lots will do the final selection. 

Such a system seems arbitrary and non-meritocratic. However, no one is claiming that the current testing system is selecting the best engineers and doctors. In fact, the evidence from the top IITs shows that very few students continue to work in the discipline that they studied. A study done at IIT Bombay shows that 60% of students between 2014 and 2018 opt for jobs not linked to their branch. Of the remaining 40% majority are from the Computer Science and Electronics branches, where students typically get top jobs in the IT sector. I would also bet that a majority of the remaining will also switch from their branch to some other sector altogether in a few years after graduation – typically migrating towards finance, consulting, and other business related sectors.

Further, the slightest of differences in scores can cause your rank to fall precipitously; and those with lower scores may actually be better at many of the unmeasured skills and attitudes needed to be a good engineer. This got highlighted recently in the media after the phenomenal success of the Chandrayaan 3, where it was clear that most of the scientists were from lesser known colleges in India rather than from IITs. And this is generally the case: IITians are not at the forefront of engineering and scientific innovation in general. Of course there are exceptions, especially in Computer Science and related fields. 

All of this is to refute the argument that draw of lots will lead to inferior engineers and doctors. In fact, it might lead to better ones as there will be a much more diverse set of students, who wouldn’t have been burnt out by years of preparation in mostly poor physical and emotional conditions. A recent survey at IIT Bombay shows that more than 50% of the first year students felt drained out, a claim that Soumyo Mukherjee, dean of Student affairs, IIT-B, agreed to. I have also written about this issue in detail in my book in the chapter titled “Is the stress and burden of tuition, coaching classes productive?”. 

Solutions such as banning tests, or restricting coaching to evening hours, or any other similar solutions may at best be a bandaid, but in most cases, the people involved will find creative ways around such restrictions. As long as the lure of being able to crack the exam and therefore secure a handsome future remains, the target audience of parents and students and their coaching classes will continue to find ways to slog 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 2 to 6 years. The title of one such media article points attests to this – Parents tell their children, there is no going back: Police on suicides in Kota. Obviously no parent wants anything untoward happening to their ward, but as parents they also believe that they are doing the right thing for their child’s future by pushing them to work. But it’s also the reality that suicides are only the tip of the iceberg; a much large number of kids have mental health issues given the conditions and their poor prospects of making it through these exams. It’s known to parents and to their wards, and to those running the classes, and basically the whole world, that most kids aren’t going to make it. But none of that is going to change the obsession with coaching till the exam remains so tough.

So however counter-intuitive the solution might sound, the only workable solution seems to be a draw of lots after a test of the basic skills. And keep in mind that the real issue is that India has very few quality colleges that offer quality education at a price that most Indian parents can afford. That being a far more time consuming problem to solve, the proposed changes in the selection system should allow for more holistic development of the students in the meantime. 

I have spent many years thinking about this issue and this is the best that I could come up with, I would love to hear other solutions, either temporary or permanent.