In the ordinary course of things, I should never have heard of 17-year-old Kriti Tripathi. But her actions and suicide in May this year have compelled not just me but several others to think about her now that she is no longer amongst us.
As with all such suicides, the single thought that binds everyone is that it was such a tragic waste of a young life. While we collectively cannot prevent all suicides, what angers and upsets me is that this is one life that need not have been lost. This is the symptom of a system we have created and one that for some odd reason we — including those who have the power to change it — seem strangely reluctant to change.
I speak here of the Kota coaching centres that prepare students for the JEE entrance examination. Every year, several students take their lives unable to cope with the stress and possibility of failure. In a poignant letter written to her parents and a friend before she took her own life, Kriti urges the government to shut these coaching institutes, putting it simply as “they suck”.
But instead of looking at ways of reducing the stranglehold of this single entrance examination, I find the government is in fact looking at strengthening its hold. There are news reports that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is seriously considering making the JEE examination the single entrance test for undergraduate BE (bachelor of engineering) courses across the country.
When I asked a former bureaucrat of the human resources development ministry why the government doesn’t look at ways to reduce the relevance of the JEE, his answer didn’t surprise me. He said that there were too many vested interests in keeping the existing system alive. The coaching industry around JEE is estimated to be around Rs 2.4 lakh crore annually. Institutes were often owned by politicians or by other equally powerful people.
So here I have a suggestion for Prakash Javadekar, the newly appointed HRD minister, based on chats with some IIT professors, students and other academicians. I’m sure it’s not perfect but if it prevents even one suicide, I think it’s worth a try.
Reduce the importance of the JEE or any single entrance test we may design for entry. Broaden the criteria for admission. Let’s have ten different criteria for admissions to IITs and other engineering institutions with a 10 per cent weightage for each. Widen the selection search so that the importance of each individual criterion is less.
The criteria could include board examination results, a graded essay, the entrance examination, marks for sports and other extracurricular activities, a group discussion amongst students who make the cut and a detailed interview of the candidate among other similar criteria. This will make it more holistic and less dependent on one single examination. I am making the point for engineering but in general it can be made applicable across colleges and disciplines.
The wider criteria will work better for the institutions too. Speak to any IIT professor and he will tell you that every batch has several students who are too “nerdy or geeky” and narrowly focused, failing to fit into the wider requirements of community living and studying. Often, these are the most brilliant students who don’t need coaching to get in, stand out due to their razor-sharp minds but get labelled as “oddballs” by the rest. A more holistic approach for entrance will force them to make an effort to mingle and develop some interpersonal skills — even if the jobs they aspire to and bag don’t really require them. As a senior IIT Delhi professor told me, “You will just get a more balanced person and I cannot see the harm in that.”
Even as the number of criteria is widened, the test itself can be redesigned. Many students — and professors — say that the current entrance examination fails to test real interest and aptitude and can be “beaten” by aggressive coaching.
The test should be more like an aptitude test — as has been suggested by the Ashok Mishra Committee which recently went into the subject — and work more like the GMAT or SAT. You can take the test more than once and on different dates within a span of almost one year for entrance into the forthcoming session. The option of taking the required aptitude test on any day — and improving your final score if the first performance is not up to the mark — will change the dynamics forever.
The dreaded single-day entrance examination will no longer be a “matter of life and death” — figuratively and, in some cases, literally.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
