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Kapil Sibal, make higher education stress-free
too!
Saturday, October 02, 2010 08:37:23 AM,
Sanjiv Kataria, IANS
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When it comes to taking any
decisions on the hallowed portals of engineering and management
education, even a visionary and an overzealous human resource
development minister like Kapil Sibal has to contend with the slow
and time-consuming process of decision-making.
The need for de-stressing the transition from secondary schools to
graduate programmes in engineering is something everyone agrees
on. But the way to reduce multiplicity of exams has eluded the
Council of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
The stress for students starts much before it is time to take the
IIT-Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and such other exams. Here
are a couple of examples of how deep-rooted the “stress” is.
Every weekend I see 10-year-old Sridhar playing football in our
neighbourhood park. This is what a Class 4 urban Indian child is
expected to do. I have never tried asking Sridhar what career he
is preparing for.
Not because he is too young to answer that question but because I
learnt that in Class 4, his grandfather is already teaching him
math for Class 6 and his mother, an MNC executive, teaches him
Sanskrit - a clear give away that they want the child to do well
in high-scoring subjects in school and join the ranks of other
family members to be an engineer or a doctor.
Take another example. My 17-year old nephew, Shishu, has spent the
last two years coping with his final years at school and a
coaching centre for multiple admission tests so that he could
become an engineer, just like his dad.
Both Sridhar and Shishu seemingly enjoy their days in school but
not many psychologists and educationists would agree with that.
Anecdotally, we know that the student stress levels climb up in
the final years of school and peak as they go through multiple
admission tests.
Some test the ability to apply principles of science while others
are purely objective type but with negative marking for incorrect
answers. Some use computers while others use machine readable
answer sheets with correct answers to be blackened with an HB
pencil.
The stress levels across the country just refuse to die down even
with multiple counselling sessions.
These are just a few examples of how first the parents and then
the education administrators add unnecessary “stress” to young
Indians aspiring to pursue professional programmes.
Let us not forget that the biggest stress for a general category
student is that only 45 percent of the total seats are available
to him/her, the rest being cornered by the reserved categories.
Even though academicians and policymakers agree on the urgent need
to ‘de-stress’ young Indians, no consensus could still be reached
on the recommendations of the IIT Kharagpur director Damodar
Acharya committee on the way to reduce multiple entrance tests.
The IIT directors now face an unresolved issue of how much
weightage to give to the Class 12 exam and a new proposed entrance
exam. As the clamour to do away with the IIT JEE exam mounts, they
have made clear their unwillingness to do so.
The task of finding an acceptable alternative has now been
entrusted to yet another committee headed by science and
technology department secretary T. Ramasami.
The new group will assess the examination and admission system for
engineering programmes. It appears that Ramasami’s group has a
‘limited mandate’ - do everything except doing away with the IIT
JEE examination.
Here are three suggestions for the committee:
First, allow IIT directors to get off the IIT-JEE hobby horses and
kill the cram schools.
Second, do not re-invent the wheel.
Third, look at what has been tried, tested, practised and working
right here in India and follow that.
Let me elaborate on the third one:
- Treat the young Indian as the key customer and design a system
that de-stresses him completely.
- Let there be just one admission test for all professional
programmes, more to test the ability of the test taker to go
through the rigours of a professional programme.
- Assign a weightage to Class 12 marks/grades by all means. Make
sure that the weightage assigned is high enough - say 75-85
percent so that the students don’t queue up at the cram schools,
hereafter.
- Institutes like BITS, Pilani, have for decades used a method to
create parity between students of two dozen-odd boards in the
country.
- Use a “SAT”, “GRE” or “GMAT” kind of a computer-based test with
a year-long test window with multiple attempts and a
three-year-long score validity.
- Within this computer-based format align the test with the
curriculum that is taught in most boards by the number of
students. Do away with negative marking to let the students take
calculated risks.
- Let the test takers appear for the test as per their
convenience. Allow them to choose a test date that works best for
them. Permit them to take re-tests if they feel they could not
perform to the best of their abilities.
- Taking the re-test in the same year has another benefit - the
student does not need to drop a year to try and get admission.
And let our future engineers be a product of a system that
encourages innovation creativity, and not only cramming.
(Sanjiv Kataria,
a Strategic Communications
and PR Counsel, was
brand custodian for the NIIT group until 2006.
He can be reached at
sanjiv.kataria@gmail.com)
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