The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Humanities, Science too not spared

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Friday, Mar 06, 2009
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Humanities, Science too not spared

Priscilla Jebaraj

Arts and science course aspirants also joining the entrance coaching bandwagon

Photo: M.Vedhan

Competition is intense not just for conventional, professional courses, but also other streams in arts and science. A group of students pursuing humanities at the IIT Madras. —

CHENNAI: For many students now in the middle of their Class 12 examinations, a testing season has just begun. After their board examinations, many of them will go on to slog their way through coaching classes and entrance tests this summer. And it is not just engineering and medicine – humanities and arts students are also joining the entrance coaching bandwagon as their best courses get more competitive.

“The HSEE (Humanities and Social Sciences Entrance Examination) is as competitive as the JEE [Joint Entrance Examination],” says Manoj Ramachandran, who is doing his second year at the IIT-Madras Humanities programme. The numbers bear him out – with over 1,500 students competing for less than 30 seats in 2007, Ramachandran and his classmates had a 1:50 chance of getting through, almost exactly the same ratio faced by their counterparts in IIT’s B.Tech programme that year.

While just about every student who wrote JEE would have gone through coaching, the trend is catching on for the Humanities examination as well. “About half my class went for coaching. When competition increases, we need to get an edge,” he says.

Manoj was coached by Smart Training Resources institute, whose course director Archana says that while anyone with high awareness of current affairs and communication skills could do well in the HSEE, coaching will help hone their skills. “It will become almost mandatory for every batch after this, because the examination is getting progressively tougher,” she says.

Hema Raman, director of Sriram Academy, which also provides HSEE coaching, says, “It’s becoming a more unstructured syllabus. The spread of subjects is too vast for any student to tackle by herself.”

Many students had no idea what ‘wetlands’ or ‘delimitation of election constituencies’ were, she says, blaming the exam-centric school system for lack of awareness among students. At IIT, there is already a debate raging over whether the JEE is admitting B.Tech students with the best coaching rather than the best students. IIT-M Humanities Department head V.R. Muraleedharan is confident that the HSEE has not reached that state of affairs yet, but he is introducing a new essay section to objective-type paper this year to tackle the issue.

“With the essay, they must have the writing skills or they will be exposed, coaching or no coaching” says Ms. Raman.

It is not just the prestigious IITs attracting the attention of coaching institutions, but top art and design courses as well. “Most of our students try to get some sort of training programme before the entrance,” says Henry Victor, head of the department of Visual Communications at Loyola College.

Keerthana Balashanmugam, who is doing a B.Des. in Knitwear Design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, wanted to be a designer since Class 6 and chose the Dress Designing vocational stream in her higher secondary school. Still, she found the need to go for a two-year coaching programme, especially for the mathematics and general knowledge section of the entrance examination.

Over 60 per cent of her classmates also went for coaching. “The drawing classes also teach you to think in a different way, even if you know how to draw,” she says. Ms. Archana of Smart Training Resources agrees. “Students may be very good in art, but not be able to answer a specific question on perspective drawing,” she says. “If they have the basic skill sets, we can fine tune it.”

For Sunanda Narayanaswamy, the crash course she took for entrance examination to MOP Vaishnav College’s B.Sc. Visual Communications course was a way to get help on creating a portfolio.

“I was a commerce student in school and only decided to do this mid-way through my Class 12… I would not have been able to get a portfolio ready in time,” she says.

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