Why entrance exams are a bane of education
How India can move forward in Education massively by getting rid of entrance tests for higher education.
Indian students have to go through numerous high octane entrance exams to study engineering or medicine.
With more and more students appearing for these exams, the level a student has to go to pass these exams have become mindless.
If you answer something wrongly, marks will be cut. While the concept you learn is 10 pages, the number of questions that you need to master to get a good score on that 10 page concept is 100 pages.
All kinds of twisted thinking in the name of setting up a question is entertained. It is almost like what a top end cricketer like Kohli would have practiced to face all kinds of balls over a period of 10 years is stuffed into 2 years of a student life.
We have rendered our schools that educated the child from 3 years of age until 15 years useless. If you study what they teach at school, you can’t hope to clear those exams. You need special coaching at exorbitant prices paid to private tuitions. More than all this, a kid who is just beginning to understand life is put through unimaginable stress for no reason, become depressed and worried, relinquish all social life and fun, and just made to read and prepare for questions on a 10000 page document.
It is time we rethink this model. If you continue with this, you will find a large number of people paying their education debt for a good part of their life, just to acquire skills in a particular domain.
Whether it is the Engineering disciplines, Pure Science or Medicine, all you are doing is learning some skills in that domain. A large part of this can be done online. You don’t need fancy buildings spread over hundreds of acres of land, holding the students permanently there to achieve this.
Higher Education institutions, Engineering and Sciences have to go for a hybrid model, find ways to scale their reach using a hybrid approach of Online classes and offline classes where required. Lab facilities can be shared across institutions just like how Hospitals have become facilities for Doctors to come and consult or how Retail outlets are shared by brands to display and sell their product.
Professors are like consultants who can be on contract to teach in one or more institutions. Institutions can collaborate to share facilities, lab, research equipment. Students can do a large part of their study online with a need to go visit a shared facility when they have to write exams, do experiments or for social gatherings.
It is time to consolidate educational institutions just like how banks are merged, Scale the admissions drastically using a judicious mix of online and offline means, preserve quality of teaching by delinking teachers from institutions.
By increasing the capacity, it is possible to charge less fees and earn more, drop the need for entrance tests altogether, make the existing board exams as the only criteria to have a logical continuity into college admissions and ban entrance exams altogether.
If you doubt the power of online, look at the IIT Madras Data Science course which is taught by the same professors who teach there or the numerous successful online courses taught by eminent people.
If you doubt the standards of education cannot be held high without a mind numbing hard entrance exam, look at the ISRO scientists launching Chandrayan missions who have come from a modest background from regular State Government schools.
If you doubt that education institutions cannot share resources, look at how banks got merged or cell phone companies share mobile towers.
If you doubt good professors are available only in some institutions, look at how hospitals employ consultants who are specialists and how their services can be shared across multiple organizations.
We need to look at education as an enabler not as a barrier.
The country should be ready to educate anyone who wants to learn by eliminating the bottlenecks we have instead of stifling the interest in the children to pursue learning with monstrous entrance exams.
My question is, suppose a person doesn’t get through an entrance exam, do they have to abandon their interest in learning a domain skill for life ?
Why not keep it flexible, allow anyone to become interested in anything at any time and pursue it freely without bottlenecks?
India is blessed with human resources. The best way you can use them and develop this country is by enabling more people to pursue what they want to pursue. That way you are increasing the surface area of future success of this country.
Entrance exams to learn a domain skill are as unwanted as a bicycle for a fish.