I had originally thought of collecting all arguments and publishing them in a single post, but it would have been far too long for one post; I felt that it my article could be divided into three logically distinct components:
1) Some background on myself, and my recollections of higher-secondary schoolteachers, preparing for the JEE and so on;
2) My opinion on the MHRD's suggested pattern; Also, an FAQ section which I may update from time to time.
3) Some constructive suggestions: How can the system be improved?
The following is Part 2. (Click on these links to access Part 1 and Part 3.)
The new examination pattern suggested by the MHRD is as follows:
1) All students are to give the Board exams. Students who wish to apply for any engineering or science course will have to give at least one exam, which will probably be called JEE-Main.
2) Students who wish to apply for admission to any IIT will have to give an exam called JEE-Advanced, held on the same day as JEE-Main.
Here is how admissions to major institutions will be decided:
1) For NITs, and all Centrally Funded Institutions, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 40% weight to class 12 Board, 30% weight to JEE-Main, 30% weight to JEE-Advanced.
2) For the IITs, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 50% weight to Class XII Boards, and 50% weight to JEE-Main. On the basis of this merit list, about 50000 students will be selected. (So this will act only as a 'screening'.) Ranking among these 50000 students will be decided solely on the basis of the JEE-Advanced exam.
Here are the reasons for the introduction of the new pattern, according to the MHRD:
1) The MHRD feels that the number of exams students have to give is large. This creates stress, which is not good. So we must have a small number of exams.
2) Coaching classes have recently become a major industry. Students are (it is felt) taught to think linearly in terms of problem-solving and memorization. Also, the system is unfair to poor students. So coaching classes must be stopped. Implementation of the proposal will help in doing this.
3) Students pay too little attention to the Class XII Boards. This is worrying, and improper. So we should give weight to Class XII Board results. This will also reduce the importance of coaching classes.
4) A near-perfect normalisation, based on percentile, is possible between the different State Boards and the CBSE.
Let me deal with the issues one-by-one:
1) The Question of Stress
Why are students stressed today? I believe the answer has nothing to do with the number of exams they give. Societal (and in particular, parental) pressure to perform is very high. Sadly, India is in a position where the available number of decent engineering jobs is far less than the supply of students. Only students in very good colleges (such as the IITs, NITs and a few good regional universities) can hope to survive in the race for good jobs. The possibility of a good future 'placement', as it is called, is the one factor which worries students. Combine this with the Indian tendency to take the safest possible route, and you have a situation where all of society urges you to score as well as possible for a human (and, unfortunately, chastises you if you fail to do so.) As long as there is an imbalance in demand and supply, stress is not going to go away.
In fact, the proposed changes may serve to increase stress. Earlier, if you did not do well in JEE for some reason, you could always cover up in AIEEE and gain admission to NITs (some of which are reputed to be better than many IITs). Now your future depends very much on your performance on one day. Will this not increase stress?
2) The Coaching Conundrum
I fail to realise what the problem is with coaching classes. Is it that they provide a better alternative to the Board teachers? Then I see no problem, because students learn better from good teachers. Is it that they are worse than Board teachers? This can't be true, because then students would not attend the classes at all. Is it that they focus on rote and linear training rather than creative thinking? Well, sure, some classes do, but the great thing about JEE is that students from these classes will not do well in the exam at all. Such classes eventually fall out of favour - besides, there is nothing to guarantee that all Board teachers will focus on creativity.
Is it that poor students cannot afford them? If so, this is an exceptionally silly argument. Well, guess what, the world is unfair to poor people. Poor students cannot afford AC bedrooms, or even tables and chairs. Does this mean you should ban AC bedrooms and tables and chairs? I agree that the Government should try to equalise opportunities as much as possible. But this does not mean taking good facilities away from people perceived to be privileged. The solution is to provide similar facilities, at Government expense, to the poor. One possibility could be scholarships. I shall write more about how to finance this in my third post.
3) The Boards
Please read my recollections of Board teachers in part 1. I am sure that contacting other students who have recently passed Class 12 will yield more horror stories. These are the same people responsible for setting and correcting the Board papers! The fact is that most questions in the Board are repeated verbatim from the textbook (in most cases, even the ordering of options is the same) and, as if that were not bad enough, repeated from previous years' papers! There are several aspects of intelligence. However, the only aspect important in a future engineer or scientist (conceptual understanding) is simply not tested in the Board exams. Therefore, a student's performance has absolutely no correlation with his ability to become a good scientist or engineer later.
As for the argument that giving weight to the Boards will somehow reduce the influence of coaching, that is blatant nonsense. In my entire Class 12 batch, I remember only one student who did not take coaching for the Boards. The number of students taking coaching for the Boards is probably far, far greater than the number of students taking coaching for JEE. I fail to understand how giving weight to Board exams will improve this situation.
4) Normalization
Someone once commented that even though CBSE students form only ~5% of students in India, their proportion in the IITs is ~45%. I think 45% might be an underestimate, but even if this is true, does this not imply that the CBSE is better than the Boards? After all, JEE was not based on the CBSE syllabus. (In fact, our Board textbook in Mathematics was far better than its NCERT counterpart.) Even so, the majority of students doing well in JEE were from CBSE. By putting a 98 percentile CBSE student on the same footing as a 98 percentile Board student, does the proposed system not do a great dishonour to a Board that has been putting so much effort into training its students well? The problem is not just that CBSE schools have better teachers and better students. Notice that most schools in rural areas (where average scores are very low) belong to the State board. Does this fact alone not push up the percentile scores in the top range for State Board students?
An argument is that if indeed CBSE students are better, they will make up for their losses in JEE-Main. But that is a foolish argument! The whole concept is that JEE-Main and Boards should be independent estimates of a student's intelligence! Ceteris paribus - in this case, if the JEE-Main scores are the same - a 98 percentile CBSE student is, and should therefore be treated as, superior in any measure of ability to a 98 percentile Board student! The proposed system should, and does not, take care of this fact.
FAQs
Reproduced below are some arguments from the other side of the debate. I have only included arguments which I felt were somewhat reasonable. So there are no questions like: "But the State Boards have agreed! What is your problem?" (My problem is that I don't care tuppence about the Boards' agreement.)
1. The Boards are a tried and tested system. After all, they have successfully chosen medical doctors over the decades!
This is the best argument I have from the other side.
Firstly, if 'tried-and-tested'-ness is desirable, it does not matter: The JEE is also 'tried-and-tested'.
Secondly - and here I will strike a controversial pose - the abilities required of a medical doctor are extremely different from those required of a scientist or engineer. As I have already stated above, there are different aspects to intelligence. The fact is that we vilify rote-learning and memorisation so much that no doctor will agree to being guilty of memorising. However, memorisation also means the ability to recall things at will, or to assimilate them according to your understanding. Since experience is more important to a doctor than to a scientist, this ability can indeed help. This does not mean that a doctor does not need conceptual understanding - I am merely stating that the kind of conceptual understanding required for a doctor is easier to develop than that required for a scientist or engineer. For example, in all the 2092 pages of the 38th edition of Gray's Anatomy I do not know how many conceptual details there are that cannot be understood by a slightly higher-than- average person. Remembering them, yes, that takes a lot of time and effort. (In fact, I believe medical students work far harder than engineering students.)
Please bear in mind that I have nothing but the highest respect for the custodians of our health. I believe that they, too, are intelligent, but just in a different way, and that the Boards test this particular aspect admirably well.
However, I am not entirely sure of this. If you are a doctor or a student of medicine, and if you are reading this, I would appreciate your comments below.
In any case, if it turns out that I am wrong and doctors too require this aspect of intelligence as much as scientists, I still stick to my belief that the Boards are a terrible way to gauge it, and that medical schools should also conduct their own entrance test. The fact is that AIIMS and AFMC, arguably the best medical schools in the country, already do conduct their own entrance tests - and this is not to mention AIPMT.
2. Several great engineers and scientists have come out of institutions other than IITs, and have been selected on the basis of their Board marks. For example, the only home-grown Nobel laureate, V. Ramakrishnan, did not get selected for JEE!
Firstly, there is no denying the fact that once, the Board exams used to be good. Not every Tom, Dick and Harry could pass (unlike the situation today). There were also excellent Board teachers. So where did they all disappear? I don't know. I think they were unintended victims of India's economic development; gradually, far more attractive jobs were available to Science students. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the quality of Board exams and Board teachers has eroded over the years.
Secondly, I have never claimed that only the IITs are capable of producing good engineers. The only claim is that, on an average, an engineer selected on the basis of JEE will be better than one selected on the basis of board rank.
Thirdly, whenever anyone gives throws such examples of famous people at me, they conveniently forget to mention whether or not the person had got a district rank within the top 5 in the Board (which is roughly equivalent numerically to clearing the JEE; there are 640 districts in India; multiply that by 5, and you have roughly the number of seats in JEE before the recent increase.) If the person did not do well in the Boards either, then your argument fails.
I believe the JEE is not perfect. In fact, it is far from perfect. The reason I have not stated this explicitly before is that the comparison here is with the Boards. If you are comparing heights with a garbage heap - here, the Boards - Mont Blanc and Mount Everest will appear equally tall. The point is not whether JEE is perfect or not (it is not), but whether or not it is better than the Boards. (It is much better.)
Fourthly, the point of an Entrance exam is to gauge ability at the time of admission. If the IITs fail to capitalise on the talent, then the fault lies within the IIT system, and not with the Entrance examination. (Actually, I believe that IITs have succeeded admirably well in some respects and not-so-well in others, but there is little doubt that their alumni are of very good quality - however, even if you disagree with this, the argument is still valid.) It has happened many times that geniuses have flowered very late in their life. Einstein was rejected as a researcher by the same German university system that had worked admirably well otherwise. (Of course, this requires a more nuanced understanding.) I also note from Prof. Ramakrishnan's Nobel lecture (available online) that he stood among the bottom third in his class for two years. Does this mean we give up school examinations?
3. The Board is to be used only for screening, and anyway IITs are free to decide their own admission process (like IITK is doing)! What's your problem?
I remember reading somewhere that Kapil Sibal had, ominously, made the statement that IITs would also shift to the new system by 2015. The interim system is proabably designed to soften us up before the blow. In any case, even if we use boards only as a filter, it is still a terrible, terrible idea. If JEE is imperfect (and it is), make changes to JEE, don't bring in the Boards. Who is to say how many very good students would fail to gain entrance just because some incompetent teacher corrected their Board papers?
Let us do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: I know that in Gujarat, which has about 5% of the nation's population, about 70,000 students gave their Boards this year. That means that in India, about 1,400,000 students gave their Boards this year. How many students' scores will be counted in the advanced JEE? Let's say 50,000. That means that, to stand a chance, you have to obtain approximately a 95 percentile score in your board, just to pass the 'filter'! Many good students I know would not have obtained that score (which requires memorizing).
Most students cannot (and should not) be confident enough that they will clear IITK's entrance exam. Therefore, even if only three or four other IITs stick with the MHRD's asinine proposal, most students will have to waste time preparing for the useless Boards. Earlier, good concepts would have at least ensured that you cleared the low cut-off. Now good concepts will no longer be sufficient. Students will face more stress preparing for the Boards as well.
I shall add more to the FAQs if I encounter other worthwhile questions.
1) Some background on myself, and my recollections of higher-secondary schoolteachers, preparing for the JEE and so on;
2) My opinion on the MHRD's suggested pattern; Also, an FAQ section which I may update from time to time.
3) Some constructive suggestions: How can the system be improved?
The following is Part 2. (Click on these links to access Part 1 and Part 3.)
The new examination pattern suggested by the MHRD is as follows:
1) All students are to give the Board exams. Students who wish to apply for any engineering or science course will have to give at least one exam, which will probably be called JEE-Main.
2) Students who wish to apply for admission to any IIT will have to give an exam called JEE-Advanced, held on the same day as JEE-Main.
Here is how admissions to major institutions will be decided:
1) For NITs, and all Centrally Funded Institutions, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 40% weight to class 12 Board, 30% weight to JEE-Main, 30% weight to JEE-Advanced.
2) For the IITs, a combined merit list will be drawn as per the following weights: 50% weight to Class XII Boards, and 50% weight to JEE-Main. On the basis of this merit list, about 50000 students will be selected. (So this will act only as a 'screening'.) Ranking among these 50000 students will be decided solely on the basis of the JEE-Advanced exam.
Here are the reasons for the introduction of the new pattern, according to the MHRD:
1) The MHRD feels that the number of exams students have to give is large. This creates stress, which is not good. So we must have a small number of exams.
2) Coaching classes have recently become a major industry. Students are (it is felt) taught to think linearly in terms of problem-solving and memorization. Also, the system is unfair to poor students. So coaching classes must be stopped. Implementation of the proposal will help in doing this.
3) Students pay too little attention to the Class XII Boards. This is worrying, and improper. So we should give weight to Class XII Board results. This will also reduce the importance of coaching classes.
4) A near-perfect normalisation, based on percentile, is possible between the different State Boards and the CBSE.
Let me deal with the issues one-by-one:
1) The Question of Stress
Why are students stressed today? I believe the answer has nothing to do with the number of exams they give. Societal (and in particular, parental) pressure to perform is very high. Sadly, India is in a position where the available number of decent engineering jobs is far less than the supply of students. Only students in very good colleges (such as the IITs, NITs and a few good regional universities) can hope to survive in the race for good jobs. The possibility of a good future 'placement', as it is called, is the one factor which worries students. Combine this with the Indian tendency to take the safest possible route, and you have a situation where all of society urges you to score as well as possible for a human (and, unfortunately, chastises you if you fail to do so.) As long as there is an imbalance in demand and supply, stress is not going to go away.
In fact, the proposed changes may serve to increase stress. Earlier, if you did not do well in JEE for some reason, you could always cover up in AIEEE and gain admission to NITs (some of which are reputed to be better than many IITs). Now your future depends very much on your performance on one day. Will this not increase stress?
2) The Coaching Conundrum
I fail to realise what the problem is with coaching classes. Is it that they provide a better alternative to the Board teachers? Then I see no problem, because students learn better from good teachers. Is it that they are worse than Board teachers? This can't be true, because then students would not attend the classes at all. Is it that they focus on rote and linear training rather than creative thinking? Well, sure, some classes do, but the great thing about JEE is that students from these classes will not do well in the exam at all. Such classes eventually fall out of favour - besides, there is nothing to guarantee that all Board teachers will focus on creativity.
Is it that poor students cannot afford them? If so, this is an exceptionally silly argument. Well, guess what, the world is unfair to poor people. Poor students cannot afford AC bedrooms, or even tables and chairs. Does this mean you should ban AC bedrooms and tables and chairs? I agree that the Government should try to equalise opportunities as much as possible. But this does not mean taking good facilities away from people perceived to be privileged. The solution is to provide similar facilities, at Government expense, to the poor. One possibility could be scholarships. I shall write more about how to finance this in my third post.
3) The Boards
Please read my recollections of Board teachers in part 1. I am sure that contacting other students who have recently passed Class 12 will yield more horror stories. These are the same people responsible for setting and correcting the Board papers! The fact is that most questions in the Board are repeated verbatim from the textbook (in most cases, even the ordering of options is the same) and, as if that were not bad enough, repeated from previous years' papers! There are several aspects of intelligence. However, the only aspect important in a future engineer or scientist (conceptual understanding) is simply not tested in the Board exams. Therefore, a student's performance has absolutely no correlation with his ability to become a good scientist or engineer later.
As for the argument that giving weight to the Boards will somehow reduce the influence of coaching, that is blatant nonsense. In my entire Class 12 batch, I remember only one student who did not take coaching for the Boards. The number of students taking coaching for the Boards is probably far, far greater than the number of students taking coaching for JEE. I fail to understand how giving weight to Board exams will improve this situation.
4) Normalization
Someone once commented that even though CBSE students form only ~5% of students in India, their proportion in the IITs is ~45%. I think 45% might be an underestimate, but even if this is true, does this not imply that the CBSE is better than the Boards? After all, JEE was not based on the CBSE syllabus. (In fact, our Board textbook in Mathematics was far better than its NCERT counterpart.) Even so, the majority of students doing well in JEE were from CBSE. By putting a 98 percentile CBSE student on the same footing as a 98 percentile Board student, does the proposed system not do a great dishonour to a Board that has been putting so much effort into training its students well? The problem is not just that CBSE schools have better teachers and better students. Notice that most schools in rural areas (where average scores are very low) belong to the State board. Does this fact alone not push up the percentile scores in the top range for State Board students?
An argument is that if indeed CBSE students are better, they will make up for their losses in JEE-Main. But that is a foolish argument! The whole concept is that JEE-Main and Boards should be independent estimates of a student's intelligence! Ceteris paribus - in this case, if the JEE-Main scores are the same - a 98 percentile CBSE student is, and should therefore be treated as, superior in any measure of ability to a 98 percentile Board student! The proposed system should, and does not, take care of this fact.
FAQs
Reproduced below are some arguments from the other side of the debate. I have only included arguments which I felt were somewhat reasonable. So there are no questions like: "But the State Boards have agreed! What is your problem?" (My problem is that I don't care tuppence about the Boards' agreement.)
1. The Boards are a tried and tested system. After all, they have successfully chosen medical doctors over the decades!
This is the best argument I have from the other side.
Firstly, if 'tried-and-tested'-ness is desirable, it does not matter: The JEE is also 'tried-and-tested'.
Secondly - and here I will strike a controversial pose - the abilities required of a medical doctor are extremely different from those required of a scientist or engineer. As I have already stated above, there are different aspects to intelligence. The fact is that we vilify rote-learning and memorisation so much that no doctor will agree to being guilty of memorising. However, memorisation also means the ability to recall things at will, or to assimilate them according to your understanding. Since experience is more important to a doctor than to a scientist, this ability can indeed help. This does not mean that a doctor does not need conceptual understanding - I am merely stating that the kind of conceptual understanding required for a doctor is easier to develop than that required for a scientist or engineer. For example, in all the 2092 pages of the 38th edition of Gray's Anatomy I do not know how many conceptual details there are that cannot be understood by a slightly higher-than- average person. Remembering them, yes, that takes a lot of time and effort. (In fact, I believe medical students work far harder than engineering students.)
Please bear in mind that I have nothing but the highest respect for the custodians of our health. I believe that they, too, are intelligent, but just in a different way, and that the Boards test this particular aspect admirably well.
However, I am not entirely sure of this. If you are a doctor or a student of medicine, and if you are reading this, I would appreciate your comments below.
In any case, if it turns out that I am wrong and doctors too require this aspect of intelligence as much as scientists, I still stick to my belief that the Boards are a terrible way to gauge it, and that medical schools should also conduct their own entrance test. The fact is that AIIMS and AFMC, arguably the best medical schools in the country, already do conduct their own entrance tests - and this is not to mention AIPMT.
2. Several great engineers and scientists have come out of institutions other than IITs, and have been selected on the basis of their Board marks. For example, the only home-grown Nobel laureate, V. Ramakrishnan, did not get selected for JEE!
Firstly, there is no denying the fact that once, the Board exams used to be good. Not every Tom, Dick and Harry could pass (unlike the situation today). There were also excellent Board teachers. So where did they all disappear? I don't know. I think they were unintended victims of India's economic development; gradually, far more attractive jobs were available to Science students. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the quality of Board exams and Board teachers has eroded over the years.
Secondly, I have never claimed that only the IITs are capable of producing good engineers. The only claim is that, on an average, an engineer selected on the basis of JEE will be better than one selected on the basis of board rank.
Thirdly, whenever anyone gives throws such examples of famous people at me, they conveniently forget to mention whether or not the person had got a district rank within the top 5 in the Board (which is roughly equivalent numerically to clearing the JEE; there are 640 districts in India; multiply that by 5, and you have roughly the number of seats in JEE before the recent increase.) If the person did not do well in the Boards either, then your argument fails.
I believe the JEE is not perfect. In fact, it is far from perfect. The reason I have not stated this explicitly before is that the comparison here is with the Boards. If you are comparing heights with a garbage heap - here, the Boards - Mont Blanc and Mount Everest will appear equally tall. The point is not whether JEE is perfect or not (it is not), but whether or not it is better than the Boards. (It is much better.)
Fourthly, the point of an Entrance exam is to gauge ability at the time of admission. If the IITs fail to capitalise on the talent, then the fault lies within the IIT system, and not with the Entrance examination. (Actually, I believe that IITs have succeeded admirably well in some respects and not-so-well in others, but there is little doubt that their alumni are of very good quality - however, even if you disagree with this, the argument is still valid.) It has happened many times that geniuses have flowered very late in their life. Einstein was rejected as a researcher by the same German university system that had worked admirably well otherwise. (Of course, this requires a more nuanced understanding.) I also note from Prof. Ramakrishnan's Nobel lecture (available online) that he stood among the bottom third in his class for two years. Does this mean we give up school examinations?
3. The Board is to be used only for screening, and anyway IITs are free to decide their own admission process (like IITK is doing)! What's your problem?
I remember reading somewhere that Kapil Sibal had, ominously, made the statement that IITs would also shift to the new system by 2015. The interim system is proabably designed to soften us up before the blow. In any case, even if we use boards only as a filter, it is still a terrible, terrible idea. If JEE is imperfect (and it is), make changes to JEE, don't bring in the Boards. Who is to say how many very good students would fail to gain entrance just because some incompetent teacher corrected their Board papers?
Let us do a back-of-the-envelope calculation: I know that in Gujarat, which has about 5% of the nation's population, about 70,000 students gave their Boards this year. That means that in India, about 1,400,000 students gave their Boards this year. How many students' scores will be counted in the advanced JEE? Let's say 50,000. That means that, to stand a chance, you have to obtain approximately a 95 percentile score in your board, just to pass the 'filter'! Many good students I know would not have obtained that score (which requires memorizing).
Most students cannot (and should not) be confident enough that they will clear IITK's entrance exam. Therefore, even if only three or four other IITs stick with the MHRD's asinine proposal, most students will have to waste time preparing for the useless Boards. Earlier, good concepts would have at least ensured that you cleared the low cut-off. Now good concepts will no longer be sufficient. Students will face more stress preparing for the Boards as well.
I shall add more to the FAQs if I encounter other worthwhile questions.
I believe that it doesn't take much intelligence on any one's part to see how disastrous the "reforms" are. Interestingly the director of FIITJEE in an interview said that this normalization stuff is so stupid - and I have exactly the same take on every single proposition of the ministry. Now, the director of a coaching institute understands what implications these reforms have and how they'll prove detrimental in the long run; sadly, the directors of IITs don't.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think the directors know fully well the implications of these so-called 'reforms'. To them, however, the maintenance of IITs as good institutes is a goal secondary to their desire to remain in power for a longer time. Of course, some directors may sincerely believe that the reforms are good (no one has said that the Directors have to be as intelligent as their faculty). Sadly, no one has offered a logical reason, so far, for encouraging this idiocy. When someone as learned and formerly respected as Gautam Barua fails to hold his own public arguments to the same high rigorous standards in clarity and logic to which he presumably holds his publications, one begins to wonder what the reason might be.
ReplyDeleteI was also initially opposed to the ISEET proposal, but now, I am not sure if it is necessarily as disastrous an idea as many are claiming it to be. I agree to almost all of your arguments above and I agree that it does not solve any of the problems that it is supposed to. No, coaching classes will not magically go away. No, stress on students is not going to decrease. Yes, this issue is getting far more attention than it deserves and people should be focusing more on improving board exams, providing more infrastructure at schools and training better teachers. My only contention is that, perhaps, the ISEET is going to bring in 'better' students to the IITs than JEE.
ReplyDeleteThe final ranking is still going to be based on the so called advanced test which will be like the current JEE with a filtering on the basis of the mains marks and the boards percentile. As you have pointed out, if one assumes the mains marks do not change things much, one would need to be in the top 5% of their respective boards to be qualified for IITs. (There are in fact around 10 million students that give the boards exams every year, but only 1-1.5 million of them are expected to write the ISEET so I agree with your calculations). This corresponds roughly to scoring around 88-90% for the CBSE students. (In 2011, 22k out of 7 lakh CBSE students scored more than 90%.) Those students who are doing good in both JEE and board exams will not be affected by the new system. The only thing that will happen is that we will select some students with lower JEE rank and high (>90%) boards marks in favor of some students with higher JEE rank and low boards marks. At least in my experience, people with high boards marks tend to be more articulate and organized, and I feel we need more people like that in IITs.
People will still have to focus a lot on concepts to get into IITs because the final rank is, after all, based on the JEE like test, so I don't that you are right in making a comparison between JEE and board exams. Of course, I realize that filtering out everyone with less than 85% marks in boards has its own problems. (People from rural backgrounds will suffer, boards exams are flawed yada yada yada.) At the same time, I think the new exam will probably be better for the IITs.
@Shitikanth: Thanks for the comment! However, your experience, from what I have gathered, is limited to the CBSE Board. As I have already stated, I think the CBSE Board puts in far more effort (in terms of money, in terms of training, etc.) towards providing a good education. Your point about students needing to be more articulate is well-taken. But I wonder how many State Boards are as effective in grading the level of articulateness of examinees as the CBSE Board. There have been Board rankers (and some Board teachers) in Gujarat who are unable to string a series of words together to form a coherent sentence in English.
DeleteThere are some suggestions I have, and as you have raised this very valid point, I shall add them to part 3 of my blog. One possibility is to include a general essay on a current topic, as part of the JEE. (This could be a one-hour exam after both the Main exams.) Another thing that could be done is to encourage other IITs to follow IITK's pattern, if they do not already do so: At the time of admission, take a written (and, if you wish, oral) test to gauge proficiency in the English language. If a student is found deficient, make him take a Basic Spoken & Written English course in place of the regular HSS course. Also, the seniors need to be more pro-active in encouraging the incoming juniors to converse more in English. I have noticed that GH residents tend to speak far better English than us boys; I think one reason might be that they use it more frequently in day-to-day speech.
Also, the reason you don't think this is a big issue is, again, probably that your experience is limited to CBSE. Good concepts may ensure that you will, at least, pass the screening in CBSE. That is not true for the State Boards! Many good students from the State Boards may be left out. Secondly, Boards are a screening only for the CBSE. What about the NITs, which have far more seats than the IITs? They will actually give some weight to the State Board!
Sorry, in the last paragraph, I meant: "Secondly, Boards are a screening only for the IITs." Too lazy to change the comment now; sorry!
DeleteWhat do you think about the new developments? A 80 percentile is much fairer than a 95 percentile, I think. Increasing the cut-off for IIT entrance is a welcome move, since it would promote students to do well in school. I know that there are great differences in Boards standards, but we can't really do anything but treat them as equal. The JEE mains marks should balance some of the irregularities in the boards standards.
Delete@Shitikanth: I agree. The 80 percentile idea makes much more sense than the original proposal. I still have doubts regarding how effective the proposal is going to be. The problem is to choose between the devil and the deep sea - keep the percentile high and you risk losing good students; keep it low and you lose a lot of the proposal's efficacy. 80% is a nice middle figure, probably the best MHRD could have come up with in the face of the opposition. This way, Sibal gets to keep face and the IITs get what they wanted.
DeleteI'm not sure what will become of the NITs, though. Is the proposal modified for them too, as it should be? I think they will face an even greater disaster if they begin to admit students on the basis of Board marks.
I still do think that paying attention to the Boards is a somewhat meaningless exercise - certainly if you are in the Gujarat State Board. For the input you put in, you get a comically low output.