In the summer of 2017 one Dalit Tamil girl committed suicide because she had failed to qualify through NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for admission into a Medical college of Tamil Nadu (TN).
Being a bright and diligent student she had aspired from her childhood to be a doctor. The admission process in TN for a seat in a medical college of the state had been simple and commoner-friendly, based on the score of the school-leaving exam (Class 12) alone, either in a Tamil medium school or an English medium school.
The Dalit girl from a very poor family, daughter of a daily wage earner had set her eye on such a seat and she scored high, very high, in Class 12 board exam in Tamil medium. She had been sure to secure a seat and her family had looked up to her to become a doctor and lift them out of dire poverty.
But Alas! That was not to be!
The goal post was shifted after she had kicked the ball. Just after she took the school-leaving exam, under pressure from the central Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Tamil Nadu government was forced to abandon this system and take to NEET.
Those who take specialist and organized coaching in English medium for centralized all India tests, such as NEET for medicine and dentistry, JEE (Joint Entrance Test for admission into the IITs and allied institutions) etc. have a head start on those who do not.
These coaching classes offer a yearly package where the student has to pay a huge non-refundable sum for the whole year right at the outset. The lower middle class send their wards to the coaching class available in town. The upper middle class and rich send them to coaching hostels where the student is under watch 24 by 7 and their success rates are much higher.
The poor cannot afford such luxury of coaching. So they lose out in the competition. This poor Dalit Tamil-medium-educated girl was un-coached and unprepared for NEET, and could not do well and chose to take her own life.
What is heart-rending is that the tragedy has repeated this year, 2018, in Tamil Nadu. Another girl, another name, another family; but the circumstances remain the same and the result is the same catastrophe. Again we hear the same television debate; familiar arguments; the same unresponsive system, loaded in favour of the rich and English medium educated.
Let there be a survey and judging by the trend of the last two decades, I would not be surprised if it is found that each candidate who has been selected by the JEE or NEET this year has been through a costly coaching institution; and an overwhelming majority among them are from English-medium schools. The poor and the commoner are protesting by committing suicide.
Incidentally, Tamil Nadu for a long time has had the best medical care facilities among all the states. Every district has its own medical college. Poor and middle class people from all over Eastern India, once I was one of them, flock to Tamil Nadu for affordable quality treatment of all kinds of ailments. People from Bangladesh and Nepal also join the crowd.
The Tamil Nadu Model
Once, many years ago, I visited a famous Missionary college in Madurai in Tamil Nadu and was invited to give a popular science lecture on airplanes. A large hall was full of mostly senior students from various science streams and some teaching faculty and I had a nearly two-hour interaction with the students. I stayed in the college for 3 or 4 days and interacted with the teaching faculty. I realized that senior students and teachers all spoke good English with a strong local accent. My surprise knew no bounds when I interacted with some fresh men in their first year in some science classes and found that they could speak English but with great difficulty, and came mostly from Tamil medium schools, so much so that the class room instruction was in Tamil, interspersed with English words and scientific terminology. Later I brought this up with some senior members of the faculty and was told that the students do learn English language in school but the medium is the mother tongue; they make the transition to English medium within the few years that they stay in the college and by the time they graduate they all speak reasonably good English and can talk about their subjects in this medium with moderate fluency.
Importance of mother tongue and the local language
At this stage I couldn’t help reminiscing about my own Bengali-medium school days, and how I made the transition in the engineering college, although there was one difference. English language was taught well in my school and I could understand class room instruction in the college that was entirely in English. However, I was shy of asking questions because I didn’t speak the language well. I overcame this hurdle within a year. Some of my class mates, whose English was poorer, were struggling more, but in the end they all made the grades and became well-placed professionals-both here and abroad.
After learning of the suicide of the poor Tamil girl, I mused that the girl would have turned into a good doctor given a chance. Experience has taught me that children grow best when they learn through their mother tongue or the local language in which they are fluent. My children were pupils in the Central School, located in the I.I.T. Kanpur campus, where the medium was bilingual in English and Hindi. The location was Uttar Pradesh and the pupils, who spoke diverse languages at home, spoke fluent Hindi which they had picked up from the majority of their playmates and the surroundings, so to speak. But their comprehension of English was poor. The teachers almost always had to explain mathematics and science in Hindi even in higher classes, although the text books were in English.
Explanation in English the children hardly understood, especially as long as they were under teens. Fluency in a language and development of logical thinking are connected, and particularly so for under-teen children. Even then the children of most lower-middle-class homes had great difficulty because their parents did not know English enough to be of any help; unfortunately in India there is a correlation between class and standard of English, even 70 years after independence. Had Hindi been prohibited in the class room of my children, it would have been a disaster.
The Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, the list is long, educate in mother tongue and produce good enough engineers and scientists to compete in a globalized economy, perhaps, better than us; we end up being the largest importer of arms in the world, whereas the Chinese are a net exporter of arms.
The English language should be taught and taught well with modern methods at an early age, but never should it be the sole medium. Students in engineering, medicine, law and various professions should make a sort of transition in their undergraduate classes, and become bilingual in mother tongue (or the local language) and English. This is exactly what the students of engineering and sciences do in Germany and Denmark, I have observed while living in those countries. This is akin to the so-called Tamil Nadu model. No wonder that TN has the best health service in the country.
With the growing popularity of the English medium, there is an alarming trend in India. A very large number of English-medium schools in India have prohibited the use of the local vernacular or Hindi in the class room and created an English-only environment. Some have gone a step further and prohibited all vernacular languages even outside the class room, that is, within the entire school perimeter.
This is forcing more and more parents to speak in English with the child rather than in the mother tongue. Students whose parents cannot speak in English are in a spot of bother. I shudder to think of the consequences ‒ from stunted learning of the children to gradual erosion of Indian languages.
The afore-mentioned coaching classes for NEET, JEE etc. not only deprive the poor who are usually vernacular-educated, but also distort our education system. These institutions are practically running a parallel schooling system minus any laboratory content and are not regulated by any affiliation to a school board or university. It is not possible to test lakhs of students for their laboratory aptitude and practical skills in a single centralized mega test, and hence various centralized examinations such as NEET, JEE etc. test only the theoretical learning of the student.
Therefore, the coaching institutions concentrate on theory and entirely ignore the laboratory and the practical. Even the teachers in a normal school are influenced by the JEE, NEET and the like; they tell their good students not to waste time in laboratories; to go to the coaching and concentrate in preparation for JEE or NEET or the like. The coaching classes tailor themselves as per the need of the entrance tests and teach only the theory of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, whereas as a nation, we are weak in practical aspects of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering and Medical research. The root cause of the problem is the centralized mega tests. They encourage the coaching classes which in turn ignore the practical and undermine our school education.
The government has announced on Saturday the 7th of July 2018 that starting from 2019 the JEE Mains and NEET will be held twice a year, so that students get a chance to improve their grade with only a 6-month wait instead of one year (Ref: News item, ‘Students can take JEE, NEET twice in a year from 2019’, Sunday Times, July 8, 2018, Delhi, Ahmedabad).
This is a bonanza for the coaching institutions; they would become more sought after and would charge a fee for every six month period and hike their annual collections, to be sure. This would marginalize the vernacular-medium student even further.
The same 7th July announcement has another part that exams will be conducted by the newly formed National Testing Agency or NTA. This is a most welcome step and was long overdue. We shall discuss about it more later.
We hear of leakage of question papers of one mega test or the other almost every year. Well financed and organized racketeers are acting to engineer such leakages; more often than not a leakage is a controlled one that benefits a limited number of students of a particular coaching class. Such a controlled leakage is not detected and does not become public knowledge. Only when the control fails and the leakage reaches a large number of candidates, it hits the headlines.
Devaluation of schooling
It was noticed since the 1990s that the students were neglecting the school syllabus in their zeal to prepare for the JEE, NEET and the like. So the Class 12 marks were given weightage of certain percentage in the centralized entrance tests. This started a competition among various state boards to inflate the scores of their students; the sentiment is that “we must facilitate our students to do well in all-India competitions”.
Now a large number of good students are fetching scores of 99% or so in many states. Other states are quickly picking up the trend and the school scores have again become immaterial and irrelevant in the admission process. Further, an unforeseen consequence is that the assessment process in the school leaving exams has suffered, and this would have long term ramifications.
Advent of on-line tests further marginalizes the poor
To cope with the burgeoning number of candidates, the tests are becoming more and more on-line. The sentiment is “Let the computer do the job”. The on-line test has multiple choice questions that require filling of bubbles on computer OMR sheets; the purpose is to save time and labour needed for manual evaluation, where OMR stands for Optical Mark Recognition. The process involves passing light through an OMR sheet in which the filled bubble, linked to the choice made by the student, is detected, and thereby the computer awards a score. The on-line multiple-choice test suffers from the following defects:
In a conventional written test an examiner can gage the candidate’s aptitude of drawing a figure of a biological cell or an experimental apparatus or a molecular configuration, all very relevant for success in various disciplines such as biology, medicine, engineering, physics and chemistry. The examiner can also judge the language skill and, through it, logical faculty to some extent and the final score reflects these. In an on-line test such things are given a go-by.
Above all, an on-line test requires some training and practice with a desk top or laptop computer which the poor can ill afford. The JEE these days are in two stages ‒ the Mains that does the first round of elimination, and in the 2nd stage the Advanced.
This year (2018) the Mains exam had an option between taking it on-line or off-line. The question paper was of course the same. The rich and the middle class opted for the on-line and the poor, without access to a computer, for the off-line. All had to fill computer-bubbles either manually in off-line or by the click of a mouse in on-line. In the off-line mode once a bubble is filled, it cannot be revised even if the candidate discovers a mistake. In the on-line version correcting such a mistake is easy and takes an additional click of the mouse. Again the poor and off-line examinee is at the losing end.
If somehow a poor meritorious student qualifies through the Mains, he now faces the formidable task of taking the Advanced Test which is mandatorily on-line. Since he cannot afford to buy a computer, he rushes to a computer café, if one is available in town, for practice and pays by the hour. For a village student the task is even more difficult; he has to re-locate to a town temporarily. The poor is at the losing end everywhere.
Two alarming events and onset of chaos
Recently an alarming event has come to light in Gujarat which bodes ill for the future. Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Board has identified hundreds of students who have scored between 90 and 100 percent on OMR sheets in the Class 10 papers, but in the descriptive portion of the papers, where answers had to be written, their performance has been abysmally poor.
This triggered suspicion of some kind of foul play, but everything so far under the radar, so to speak. The authorities are foxed as to how this fraud was executed. The board has withheld their result and is questioned them (Ref: news item ‘OMR champs Pappus are foxed by descriptive test’, The Times, Ahmedabad, Tuesday, July 3, 2018). Thereafter they were given another written test and only 10 out of nearly 400 students barely passed and that too when given a grace mark of 5.
The conclusion inescapable is that there had been foul play and yet nobody knows how. There are many questions. A few hundred have been caught because they did extremely poorly in written tests. Are there others who did not do so badly in written tests and hence are out of the drag net? How do we catch them?
Returning to the all India JEE, do we have the means to ascertain that such things have not happened this year in the JEE Mains or Advanced, since there are no descriptive written tests to correlate with?
The second alarming event happened in Tamil Nadu. More than 24000 students took the NEET test in Tamil medium, and there were serious errors in the Tamil translation from the original question paper set in English. The aggrieved students went to the High Court which stayed the on-going admissions and asked CBSE to award grace marks of 196 to these candidates and come up with a fresh merit list.
The High Court lambasted the CBSE for inaccurate and wrong translations in as many as 49 questions (Ref: “HC orders 196 ‘grace marks’ in Tamil NEET”, Times of India, July 11, 2018, Ahmedabad). The CBSE went in appeal to the Supreme Court and obtained a cancellation of the stay order and has been allowed to proceed with the admissions using the same merit list.
This means more than 24000 Tamil medium students, who are most likely from the poorer strata of society, are deprived of justice. So the vernacular-medium students lose again and the promised equality of opportunity remains only on paper.
If Tamils can take NEET in their mother tongue, then why cannot Punjabis, Gujaratis and Kannadigas? Why can the JEE not also be in Tamil medium? JEE has a provision for the Hindi medium. Why not other languages? Incidentally, in my long teaching career in two IITs, I have not come across a single successful candidate who had taken the JEE in Hindi medium. Even the reserved quota candidates, who mostly attend vernacular-medium schools, take the test in English.
The afore-mentioned questions are bound to be asked more and more, new demands would be raised followed by litigations. Are we moving towards entrance exam chaos?
The issue of question paper leakage has been discussed in the context of the coaching classes. In general, leakage means uncertainty and withering of confidence in the system. Last year it was the papers of CBSE class 10 and class 12 that got leaked. The fact is that the number of candidates is increasing extremely rapidly and has become so large that the system cannot cope.
This year 12 lakhs aspirants sat for JEE Mains, and next year this number is expected to go up by at least one lakh. The number taking CBSE Class 12 exam is of course very much larger and consequently the CBSE seems to be in bit of disarray. This year there was a large number of aggrieved class 12 examinees who requested revaluation. By the time numerous totalling errors were detected and corrected, the admission process in the colleges was well under way, and the revaluated students went to court.
The High Court ordered Delhi University that seats be increased to accommodate students who made the cut-offs after revaluation (Ref: “HC: Increase seats to take students who made cutoffs after evaluation”, Times of India, July 14, 2018, Ahmedabad). The honourable judge commented, “Revaluation cannot be in futility”. Such things are happening not only in Delhi but also in other cities, but they may not be reported. Increasing the number of seats on one-time contingency basis is easier said than done, and it is going to be an admin nightmare.
The issue of devaluation of schooling due to interference from the coaching classes has already been analysed. The remedial measure has become increasingly ineffective, as discussed above, due to artificial inflation of scores by various competing school boards. The JEE/NEET, the coaching classes and the schools are enmeshed in a tripartite complex web, leading to degeneration of our education system.
Yet the more we run into problems, the more our educational bureaucrats that include the ministerial staff prescribe centralization. They can neither learn by looking at other countries nor think innovatively. Besides, they always think on tracks that would safeguard the interests of their own children first, and that means denial of equitable opportunity to the commoner. Our political leadership needs to rise above such bureaucratic advices.
The way forward
Let there be a thorough decentralization of school and undergraduate education. There should, of course, be the chain of Central Schools in all states for catering to the children of the transferrable officers of the Central Government and the Army, Navy and other forces. Central schools are affiliated to the CBSE and this practice should continue. However, within this scheme it is possible to decentralize.
[1] There should be a subsidiary board of the CBSE at the state level, such as, CBSE Uttar Pradesh or CBSE Uttarakhand, etc. These boards should strictly follow the syllabus set by the central CBSE at Delhi, but be autonomous otherwise in the matters of administering the CBSE schools in the state.
[2] The medium of instruction should be bilingual in Hindi and English. There exists a provision for the 3rd language in the CBSE syllabus and this should continue with a slight variation. There should be an option between Sanskrit and the local vernacular; for instance, in Gujarat the third language should either be Sanskrit or Gujarati. In Hindi-speaking states the 3rd language should have an option between Sanskrit and any of the fourteen scheduled languages of India. There is little point in introducing foreign languages in Indian schools when we ourselves have such a diverse tradition and hardly know each other’s languages.
[3] A state-level CBSE board should set its own question papers but follow the time table for the board examinations (that is, the final exams of Class 10 and Class 12) set by the central CBSE. Thus the all-important board exams are held simultaneously all over India.
If there is a question paper leak, its fall out would remain limited within a state. Besides, the number of students to be handled by a board will be manageable. The task before the CBSE Delhi would be to frame/update the syllabus, set the board exam time table and all India coordination among far flung state-level CBSEs.
Most of the states already have an IIT or an equivalent (such as IISc Bangalore for Karnataka or IIST Thiruvananthapuram for Kerala) and a premier Medical College. For a cluster of small states there is at least one IIT or a medical college ear-marked; for instance, IIT Guwahati serves the seven sisters of the North-east; and the IITs at Ropar and Mandi together serve Haryana, Punjab, J & K and Himachal.
Let there be an NIT in a state that does not have an IIT, if there is demand and viability. There may even be two NITs in a trilingual state like J&K.
All centralized entrance tests, including JEE and NEET, should be abolished. Entrance to all professional institutions of Under Graduate (UG) education, be it engineering, medicine or any other, should be based on (1) Class 10 and Class 12 exam grades and (2) an aptitude test. The aptitude test should be modelled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) of USA in which basic mathematical skills are measured based on the compulsory portion of the school syllabus.
In India it would be the syllabus up to Class 10, since after this level a student chooses a stream and may not have Mathematics. Further, in the SAT of USA language skills and through it comprehension and logical faculty are gaged. The Indian version should also attempt to do this but with adjustments for local culture and conditions.
At present the JEE Mains tests advanced Math but not basic math, and does not test the other abilities as in SAT. The newly formed National Testing Agency (NTA) has been given the task of framing questions and conducting JEE Mains twice a year. In the present context of over-centralized state of affairs, this is a welcome step; but JEE Mains is not designed for testing basic aptitudes. It tests knowledge of science-stream students in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics up to class 12. What about students of other streams, like commerce, humanities etc.?
Let a SAT-like exam be conducted at the state level by an agency of the state. Let it be called Learner Aptitude Test or LAT and the testing agency be suitably named by each state; for instance, in Gujarat it may be called Gujarat Testing Agency (GTA). The state-level testing agency should frame a single test in which there should be a vernacular part and an English part and of course a Mathematics part. Comprehension and logical faculty should be tested in both languages.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) should have the task of framing and conducting a Learner Aptitude Test (LAT) for all students who pass out of schools, private and public, affiliated to various state-level CBSEs all over India; again, the test should gage comprehension and logical faculty in both the languages, Hindi and English, and of course Mathematics up to Class 10.
No school in India should be in pure English-medium; it should either be in the local vernacular medium or in a bilingual medium of either vernacular-English or Hindi-English. Let us bring back our languages centre- stage from the margins. In the last seventy years we have been relegating them to the background more and more. In the cities all over India English-medium schools have proliferated and a new generation has grown up who can hardly speak in their mother-tongue without a very liberal dose of English words and phrases. They cannot comprehend, let alone appreciate, classical literature of their own language, Hindi included. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Hindi and English are the link languages of India and the world respectively.
All UG admissions should be confined within the state. In addition to the state level CBSE, there is of course the state’s own board of secondary education. Together they can emphasize the importance of laboratory work and skill. The school teachers of the state should be motivated to do so. Now that Class 10 and Class 12 marks are brought centre-stage, the students themselves would be motivated to learn how to do experiments and acquire laboratory skills.
As of now the statistics would bear out that only a miniscule percentage of school leavers wish to go out of the state if they have a choice. Let the states compete with each other in improving their schools and UG education. For those few who are forced to migrate from one state to another under exceptional circumstances, some special arrangement can be made, for instance, the candidate should first secure admission in his home state and then seek transfer. However, a special arrangement is a matter of detail.
The Indian LAT may borrow most of the features of the American SAT, but the test should be adapted to our needs and cultural sensibility. CBSE has decided to reduce its syllabus at all levels considerably and that is a welcome step. Coupled with this if the Entrance tests (JEE, NEET etc.) are done away with, the wind will be taken out of the sails of the coaching institutions. They would surely re-model themselves and survive but would lose their prime importance. Above all they would not be in a position to distort our education system.
Let the states compete with each other. Let the states variate on the scheme outlined above and fill the details as per their individual need. If a state does well educationally, its students would have an advantage in the ‘job market’ of the expanding and modernizing economy.
The students would be spared the fruitless running around for taking a multiplicity of exams, often some of them clashing on a date. Most important, tragic events like the suicide of a poor meritorious girl as has repeatedly happened in Tamil Nadu can be avoided.