If you live in India, chances are that you would have heard about competitive exams. The three big ones held each year are the UPSC exam, the JEE Mains/Advanced exam and the NEET. Kids often write these exams when they are in the 12th class of school (well, UPSC needs a college degree, afaik). For the uninitiated, let me briefly explain them in the order.
As an aside, there are many other entrance exams like BITSAT, IAT (IISER Aptitude Test), National Law School Aptitude Test (NLSAT?) and so on. There are also college-specific entrance tests in Science, Engineering and other streams. Some states do admissions via 12th class marks and so on..
The UPSC exam is for getting into the prestigious administrative service jobs in the Govt. It is a 3 stage process with a preliminary exam, a final exam followed by an interview. The jobs range from being a “district collector” to “Chief secretary” govt to Income Tax commissioners to representing the country for posts abroad. Most jobs (to me) are boring admin jobs and often involves bootlicking ministers or politicians who cannot even read and write. Yes, these are elected representatives that you and I enthusiastically vote every five years. Democracy, ftw!
The JEE, the topic of this post, is the “Joint Entrance Exam”, held for entry into the bachelors degree programs at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). This is held in two phases, the Mains exam, a 3-hour exam in Physics/Chemistry/Math, which itself is conducted two times to give candidates a chance to improve in the second attempt and based on the Mains ranks, one can write the Advanced exam, which is a 3 + 3 hours of exam. The Advanced is supposed to be a “hard” exam is often called the “mother of all hurdles”. About 15L (L for Lakhs, an Indian system of expressing large number, finding out the equivalent in your system is an exercise to the reader – afterall, this is an article about exams) write JEE Mains and about 2,50,000 write the Advanced. Certain colleges called NITs and IIITs (there is an extra I in there!) select students for admissions based on Mains ranks. As for the IITs, they only look at the JEE Advanced scores and there are a tad more than 18000 seats across India, about half of it is for general “merit” seats. So, 15L -> 18000, you can do the math.
Now, the NEET exam (I am too lazy to look up what it stands for, don’t call me an anti-national please!). NEET is for the medical bachelor degree entry into various medical courses. There is no age limit for NEET and often, one can see 60 year olds trying to get a seat and become a doctor (Hopefully when they are 75 or so, they can start practicing after getting a post-graduation degree!). This year, 22 Lakhs (you must be familiar with Lakhs and Crores now!) students wrote NEET this year.
Let us concentrate only on JEE as that’s the one I am most familiar with and also because what I describe is somewhat similar for the other exams. We are an exam nation! There are exams through out the year. So much that there are businesses that build computer based exam centers and give it out for rent to exam conductors.
So, for the JEE, the “successful” ones often start preparation when they are in class 6 or in class 8. When their non-JEE classmates are enjoying their childhood, these kids start grinding trig identities, calculus, kinematics, magnetism, inorganic chemistry and so on. There is a large cottage industry of “coaching centers” that exist all over India to cash this huge business opportunity. The prominent ones are concentrated in certain cities (Kota, Rajastan is one such famous city, known for a huge presence of these institutes with the entire town transformed to cash in on the housing and other needs – read drugs, alcohol and so on.. – for the students). What these institute “coach” (as opposed to teach) kids is to trick this system. Back in the day, IIT-JEE as it was called at that time was meant to be a true test of your understanding of basics. Now, to a large extend this is true, but in my opinion, it is not a true test of one’s knowledge of basics. Some may argue that expertise is same as familiarity. If you are bombarded with questions after questions on different ways to solve a problem and also to solve a problem fast (as opposed ot solving it from first principles – which is a disadvantage in these competitive exams as your currency is time!), then what can you really say?
That said I believe the true learning from this process is that kids develop some kind of a resilience to slog. Once they get in, often they get into the next rat race – leetcode/DSA/system-design.. Game the next entrance exam to get into bigtech.
Some of the kids develop a aversion towards P/C/M subjects and vow to never do it again. The “coaching” centers often are biased towards “top” performers and give them special care. A tier system exist in these institutes where exams are held every week and kids are moved from one tier to other based on their performance. Think of it as a well oiled “state machine”. Some of them exit the state machine at some point and crash out. Versions of Kota based institutes exist all over India. Needless to say, the environment in these coaching centers are extremely toxic with kids trying to one-up each other at any cost.
Let me digress again and talk about kids who take a “drop year” after their 12th. These are kids who tried to get in during their 12th and didn’t get their choice of branches or colleges or didn’t qualify. They take another year off and appear again next year. This is often a hard decision because it is easy to slack off when you are on your own. So, you have to again spend money on a physical coaching institute or some online ones, have a lot of determination to pursue and revise these stuff again. This works out well for some kids as with age, they are more mature and can absorb more stuff in their brain and have already seen these topics multiple times.
As exams are held, the stress builds up for kids and parents, not just because of the exams but also because the society around them starts tracking everything minute by minute. The neighbourhood aunty and uncle starts asking them their scores, where they rank in the class, their chances of getting into “top” IITs (yes, another class system exists among IITs too!).
Towards three-fourth of the journey, often the kids burn out, they start doomscrolling, start reading, watch movies without their parents’ knowledge and find other ways to escape the grind. Meanwhile mock exams are held and marks shared (often publicly) in whatsapp groups, or published in the class. Some schools publicly humiliate certain kids on their bad performance and praise the rest. Kids go through all kinds of emotions.
The Mains first attempt is held in January and the second one in April. One month later the Advanced is held. A series of other exams follow - BITSAT (for getting into BITS), state entrance exams, college specific entrance exams and so on. In short, around ten 3-hour exams from Jan-May are not uncommon, not to mention the “MoAH”, JEE Advanced which is a 3 hours forenoon + 3 hours afternoon exam. Some parents even book a hotel room for their kids to take a short nap and relax between the two 3-hour slots.
As and when the exams are held, the coaching institutes publish their answer sheets/keys. The youtube channels celebrate these events on a daily basis, often resembling the election “exit polls”. The official results come 10 days later in stages, first the answer key is published. Some kids refuse to look at them as they develop deep aversion to any kind of exams at that point. The week the results are declared, newspaper front pages are filled with stamp sized photos of winners. No one cares how the folks who fail to qualify despite their hardwork feel when they see all these shows. “Road shows” are conducted by the coaching institutes, awards distributed!
Canvassing for the next batch begins by printing testimonials from the winners. People get fooled thinking that if they too go to these institutes, they would win.
In the past, girls were under represented in these institutes. Now a days there is a 1/5th allocation of seats reserved for Girls. With all the other reservation system (they call it by other names like affirmative action in other countries), the “merit” based system has only about less than half of the seats available. Now, the boys, who are the majority who try for the JEE (apparently more girls appear for NEET than boys, I don’t know about UPSC) are left without options. This is a pretty bad situation, a lot of deserving kids end up not getting in.
For the JEE and NEET, which is usually written when the kids are at the 12th class, they typically start after their 10th. However most kids start much early. These days the exams are getting harder and harder that starting after 10th is most likely not a good idea, unless one is ready to take a drop year.
I am firmly of the opinion that kids should be left with their hobbies and other activities at least until they are in 10th and only then start this “rat race”.
Life does not end if you don’t qualify in JEE or NEET or UPSC. The key is to have life long curiosity and keep learning. A lot of knowledge exists in good college level text books and these are available for anyone anywhere to read and work through. Getting the job is not the aim of education. I also feel it is not worth spending a lot of money on private colleges to get a degree. Getting a job is not the aim of education. Sign up for courses at NPTEL, Coursera, MIT OCW or edX or just YouTube but do it consistently as if you are in a classroom, after turning off the distractions. All you need is some Free Software, a paper notebook, a pen or pencil and a computer, in order to learn these days.
Mostly the previous paragraph apply! Exams are just “gates” to the next opportunity, not an end in itself. Don’t put these scores in your linkedin or your social media profile, that does not mean anything. If you do, it means, you are one who constantly seek validation. You cannot rest on your past laurels through out your life.
Is it worth getting into these institutes at the cost of childhood? No. Hell NO.
Unfortunately, this unhealthy practice is not going to stop because of no better alternatives. There is no political will to increase the number of seats in existing institutions or build more such institutions or elevate existing ones, often for genuine reasons like lack of good teachers. I am not here to give solutions nor do I have one. However, the way our society behaves and harass parents and students during these difficult times is shameful. It is none of their business to question an already stressful parent or a child on their marks or rank and make value judgement on them. This behaviour alone makes me feel that education has failed in this country and has failed to produce “good” individuals.
[I updated this post after writing the initial post in one sitting and the updates don’t fit very well and I didn’t bother to edit it.]