The learning curve

Testimonial ads by coaching schools should be curbed

The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) has asked the government’s Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to enforce conduct rules and disallow candidates who pass the civil-services examination to earn through testimonial advertisements after their selection. This will tamp down on a long-standing unethical practice of high rankers entering revenue-share deals with coaching institutes to use their rank and photograph by way of endorsement. The move is part of a two-month investigation, which also saw the CCPA send notices to 20 coaching institutes and slap penalties of Rs 1 lakh on four of them. But this penalty amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist for an outright unscrupulous practice that indirectly reflects the parlous state of the market for premium white-collar jobs.

According to the CCPA, the coaching industry reaps revenues of Rs 58,088 crore a year. The civil services examination is a particularly challenging business proposition since it has a low pass percentage of just 0.2 per cent of the one million students who apply for it. This makes it imperative for coaching institutes to cash in on the narrow pool of successful candidates to keep their businesses going. The standard misleading technique in claiming a high ranker’s testimonial is to suppress the fact that the student concerned may have attended classes for one or two courses only — typically, say, the interview or general studies module — rather than the whole course. The CCPA discovered that in 2022, the Union Public Service Commission had recommended 933 candidates from that year’s exam but the total count of selections claimed by institutes was over 3,500. The fact that these students continue to earn after they join the civil services magnifies the unprincipled nature of the business. Rank shopping by civil-services coaching centres is the tip of a mountainous iceberg of dishonesty in the higher education coaching business. Coaching institutes for joint entrance examinations (JEE) for engineering courses — the Indian Institutes of Technology being the target  — or the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test appear to have joined the business with a creative twist. These crammers routinely approach promising students from other institutes with contracts for testimonial advertising. This practice, which often starts before the prospective student has written the exam, again, cashes in on scarcity value. The success rate for clearing the JEE again is low.

Undoubtedly, students accepting such deals should have a sufficient understanding of morality to reject them. Indeed, some do. But the motives of the majority of recipients are easy to understand, too. As the TV serial Kota Factory eloquently showed, it costs lakhs of rupees to attend coaching classes, with students often attending multiple institutes specialising in subjects. So payments for testimonials from multiple institutes offer one way of repaying students’ debt, a huge burden for middle- and lower-middle-class families who often bet their life savings on the outcome. The fact that coaching institutes cash in on this vulnerability to inflate their credentials and generate more business on promises on which they are mostly unable to deliver is reprehensible. With the Common University Entrance Test now entering the scene, the CCPA would do well to crack down on these practices.