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Success... at any cost

Anjali Mody on why success in competitive examinations means so much.

WHAT MAKES someone willing to pay large sums of money to buy an examination question paper? Desperation is the easy answer. The prize of selection is too large to leave to chance. It is a question of life or nothing. Those who are willing to buy their way to uncertain selection are very few in number. The majority plays the game straight. It crams, and it pays, sometimes upwards of Rs. 30,000 a year, to be taught how to cram. And those who constitute the majority desperately hope that they will be among the chosen ones.

In a society as large and differentiated as India's, competitive entrance examinations are seen as the most meritocratic means of entry into educational institutions or jobs. At least, that is the theory. The reality is a little different.

The school system is designed to test survival skills. One wrong step and you are down a slippery slope. Education is a desperate effort to stay on track. According to Krishna Kumar of the Central Institute of Education, Delhi University, it is a system in which there is very little learning compared to weeding out. The figures speak for themselves. Sixty five per cent of children enrolled in schools drop out by the time they reach class eight. Some 80 per cent of those who come up to the class nine-level fail the higher secondary exam. Twenty per cent or less survive. A tiny fraction of these competes for the university places, and then the jobs that our society considers the most desirable.

"Desperation" is in-built in what Prof. Kumar describes as a "crude social Darwinist system" which tests a person's grit and ability to survive, rather more than his/her intellectual powers. The designer of the IIT-JEE exam confirmed this when he told the Yashpal Committee that the entrance test was not designed to get the best engineers, but was simply an objective way of weeding out a lot of people. Subjective tests would allow a real assessment of an individual's potential to be a good engineer.

Prof. Kumar says that societal attitudes and the education system they engender are culpable. "It is an unreformed, bad education system, which does not orient you towards what you can do well, is not concerned with a child's personality, or proclivities; instead, everyone tries for everything."

"Everything" is ordered in an unshakeable hierarchy that has changed all too little in the last 50 years. This hierarchy of qualifications and jobs decides who is successful, less successful and unsuccessful. The linkage between qualifications and jobs puts the trinity of engineering-medicine-management right on top. For an admission to an IIM, an IIT, an IIIT, a regional engineering college or medical school is a passport to a world of untold opportunities: jobs with big salaries and high social status.

While information technology has created a micro boom in private sector employment opportunities in India and as a guarantor of an H1-B United States visa, and television has made the media an attractive option, the civil services — Indian Administrative Service still on top — remain the first choice for all but a small segment of the metropolitan elite. For the largest number of jobs still remain in the state sector. The state too has used further education qualifications as selection criteria, reinforcing the linkage between degrees and jobs. Although in 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi Government's National Policy for Education included a clause on trying to de-link degrees and jobs where the nature of work did not require university qualification. While there have been half-baked efforts to `vocationalise' school education, there have been non-concomitant changes in qualification requirements.

India fits the type of a late developing country described in the 1976 book by Ronald Dore, "The Diploma Disease," where educational qualifications become central to the allocation of jobs. Where inordinate amounts of time and money are spent on trying to pass exams and all too little time or money is invested in developing useful life skills. Where "learning to do a job is replaced by learning to get a job". Where the "successful" are motivated to learn in order to earn qualifications, and the rest are twice doomed, first as "failures", by the standards of their own society, and second by an education system that is "ritualistic, tedious, suffused with anxiety and boredom, destructive of curiosity and imagination; in short, anti-educational."

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• A bolt from the blue
• Success... at any cost
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