The recent news
item that the ministry of human resource development has decided to
enforce a change in the Indian institute of technology joint entrance
examination system, which for the past half-a-century has been
responsible for preparing a national merit list that constituted the
criterion for admission, to a pattern of the MHRD’s present fancy, is
alarming. The core decision seems to be: diminish drastically the weight
of the present IIT-JEE, and supplement/complement it with high
school/board examination results.
Related news items also indicate that
this ruling was handed out despite five of the seven IIT senates
communicating written dissent.
In the first
place, the primary reason for the establishment of the JEE system was
the recognition that in this very large country with a multitude of
school boards and their non-uniform curricula and examination standards,
it would be inappropriate to go by board grades because that would
yield unreliable, undesirable results — we would not get the best
students. And, such a course, therefore, would be unfair both to the
aspiring students and to the institutions they would be entering. A
single post-high school examination with a well-defined syllabus and a
centrally administered paper-setting and grading system was thought to
be the best alternative, and the adoption of that has served very well
the students, the institutes, and the country, for the past 50 years.
How well has
that served? The first IIT was established in 1950 in the East; four
others were additionally established in other parts of the country by
the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, marking those institutions as
“institutions of national importance”.
The JEE came into existence at
that time. Whereas the course programmes of those five IITs differed
considerably from one another, driven by the efforts of dedicated
faculty and assisted by the matching endeavour of students of the
highest quality, those five institutions soared and produced world-class
graduates, of whom many went on to become leaders in academia as well
as in the corporate world. IIT became a brand name. Its course programme
and pattern of teaching were emulated; these permeated into engineering
colleges, even state-level JEEs were established to cater to the needs
of state engineering colleges. Two established engineering colleges of
high repute were added to the IIT system. And of late, the government,
presumably impressed by what the first set of IITs has delivered, has
embarked on making multiple copies of the IITs.
Anyone with
some direct experience with the IIT-JEE from any side is well aware of
its capabilities as well as its limitations. An intrinsic limitation of
the examination is that the subject material on which questions are
based remains unvarying, whereas every year it is desirable that an
entirely different set of questions be presented, so that the in-depth
understanding of the examinees of the subjects is tested more than their
familiarity with routine questions and answers. This is a challenging
task under any condition, but with the passage of time, it has become
more demanding. This was not a problem in the early years of the JEE; it
was possible then to frame a wide range of new and quality questions
that tested students’ understanding of the subjects and could also probe
their originality. At that time, the number of examinees was relatively
fewer; it was possible to do manual grading; there could be an adequate
number of questions where they were required to present their approach
to solving a problem besides presenting a final answer. The upshot was
finding, year after year, superb groups of students who were both
steeped in the basics of the subjects and also possessors of brilliant
minds.
With the
increase in the number of examinees, computer grading had to be
introduced; the number of questions that used to require the students to
express their ways of solving a problem had to be cut down. A major
consequence of this was reduced scope in assessing the quality of
intellect; and, as a result, the truly talented could not always be
distinguished from the rest. The standard dropped. The naturally better
student was put at a relative disadvantage.
Grading by a mere final
answer, as is the hallmark in computer grading, does not pick out the
exceptional ones. If the purpose is to identify the most talented
students, the questions must have a component that requires the
student to express his/her path to the solution of a problem and thus
bring out his/her quality of thinking. Growing deficiencies such as this
were realized and have been subjects of continual discussion in the
IITs. The faculty was concerned because any compromise in the quality of
entering students adversely affected all academic programmes of the
institutes. It is a good guess that it is for this reason that the
faculty wants to retain the option of questions requiring the examinees
to show their method of obtaining a solution and does not want to fall
back entirely on multiple choice questions. Even though the former
course would mean substantially more work for them in paper-setting and
in evaluation. With all multiple-choice type questions, the apprehension
probably is that the quality of entering students will drop further.
At the
present juncture, one debated issue is the decision to slash the
contribution of the JEE score and, in lieu of that, to bring in
high school performance.
The other is how much the ministry is
overstepping in seemingly dictating the modus operandi of admission
when the academic senate of each institute seems to be the statutory
authority on all academic procedures.
If, in spite
of the written dissent from five out of the seven senates, the MHRD has
gone ahead with the ruling when it does not seem to have the authority
to decide unilaterally, it has surely overstepped. However, this is not
the first time that the ministry is trying to impose its own views. It
has done so in the past. Some will remember the slashing of the
five-year programme to a four-year programme, in which it summarily
overruled the contrary views of the faculty. Whether the MHRD’s present
ruling is simply an emphatic expression of what it thinks of as the
provider’s prerogative or it is, with good intention but with inadequate
understanding, merely the chief’s choice — we need not argue about that
over here.
It is basically a legal matter, procedures to resolve such
issues are well known. However, the other issue, that is, whether or not
school performance should be included, and how and to what extent, is a
major academic question and that calls for discussion.
To start
with: what is so bad about including the school performance of the
candidates? Is it not done even in the most advanced countries? The
answer is: true, there is nothing intrinsically bad — in fact, it is
quite desirable. In the best academic institutions of the world it is
routinely done. Except that it is not done mechanically:
individuals scrutinize records of students, in which besides students’
class and final examination performances, teachers’ critical views and
recommendations — both valuable — also count.
Any machine handling of
school performance is inherently handicapped in this regard; it leaves
out all the latter inputs which in some ways provide important parity
checks.
The crucial
question to ask here is: has our school education system now become
sufficiently dependable that it can replace a centralized examination
system for the IITs that has found good students for the past fifty
years? If the answer is yes, then the IIT-JEE should be scrapped
right away and the school performance be taken entirely as the
sole criterion for admission.
However, if the answer is no, then
there is no case yet to include such results even in part to
select the best students, because the non-uniformity flaw sits as
potentially deleteriously in the part — and would vitiate the
selection process — just as much as it would do in the former. Involved
statistical tinkering, even with the best intention of correcting
non-uniformities in the present school education system, or including
additional psychometric tests would introduce many inadequately tested
variables that one should not depend upon.
So, how to
move forward meaningfully? There has been a suggestion to include high
school performance as a cut-off for eligibility — not to be used in any
way for ranking — which is sensible. What the precise percentile value
of this cut-off should be is a matter of detail; only that it should be
set at a point so that adequate attention to school-based work is
encouraged. It should be tried as an initial step until there are
uniform board examinations in the country.
The first level of the
examination — the screening examination — because it has to handle a
very large number of aspirants — necessarily has to be computer
gradable, and it would mean adoption of multiple choice questions.
After
this screening, the final or advanced examination, the only one which
should be used for ranking, must test, besides the students’
problem-solving abilities, their in-depth understanding of the subjects
and quality of thinking.
The goal is to identify and train the most
talented students in the country.
Whether good
sense will return to the MHRD and it will reconsider its decision is
hard to predict, because one feels that had the right perception
existed, the present state would not have been reached. One still hopes
against hope that rectification will be possible. Because compromising
standards is easy, sustaining and raising them are difficult.
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