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Of course, a consequence of having such a difficult exam is that students force themselves to train harder in order to have a better shot at doing well. While this may admittedly lead to higher "stress levels", it is a natural consequence of market forces at work. When you have a limited supply of seats, and a large demand for it, the people who work hardest at getting the seats are the ones who will get them.
Now we have new-fangled ideas doing the rounds about "reducing stress levels" by instituting reforms to the exam process. But how exactly does it help if it does not change the fundamental balance of supply and demand? Sure, we could institute a lottery system to replace the exam thus reducing the "stress levels" of students, but why is that the right thing to do? Wouldn't we rather have people working harder to succeed in a fairer process? All of the recent attempts to make the IIT-JEE "easier" suffers from this kind of myopic thinking.
If we really wanted to reduce stress levels, a good place to start might be to reduce the need to rank people based on the test and focus instead only on selection. Students could be allowed to join without having to choose a major ahead of time, and be provided reasonable freedom to study the major of their choice. This would certainly help reduce the pressure on students by enabling them to put in just enough effort to cross the threshold rather than to go all out to rank highest. (And given the law of diminishing returns, it should be less work to make the top 4000 than to make the top 100.)
It is another matter entirely that the proposed reforms do little to even advance the goal of reducing stress levels. There are now rules in place restricting the number of times a person may appear for the JEE, when he/she may take the exam and so on which would appear to violate the cardinal rule for rulemaking: "Don't make up a rule unless you have to."
So, it looks like the admission process for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been revised yet again. And I must say I am very unimpressed with the consequences. The reforms have the ostensible goal of reducing stress levels for students. I completely fail to see how this goal is being satisfied by the proposed reforms. But I want to ask a more fundamental question: Is the reduction of student stress levels an achievable goal at all, and should we be targeting achieving it?
Frst, some background. At its heart, the IIT Joint Entrance Examination is a means to select 4000-odd top engineering aspirants in the country. About 200,000 candidates appear for the exam annually, resulting in a highly competitive selection process with a 2% acceptance rate. (Note that the candidate pool is actually even higher, with many students self-selecting by not bothering to appear for the exam at all.) Furthermore, the exam is also required to rankthese 4000-odd students, with higher-ranked students getting first tilt at selecting their major and the location where they want to study. (There are now 7 IITs across the country.) Both these are fairly crucial variables for a student setting out on his/her undergraduate career, so that people aspire not only to qualify but to do so with as high a rank as possible.
Now, creating a ranked list of 4000 students from a ridiculously large candidate pool is a complex task requiring a highly objective test methodology; mere subjective evaluation of resumes simply will not cut it, providing scope for serious abuse of process and corruption and also leading to great resentment among the rejected. Just using high-school performance results does not cut it either thanks to (a) the bugbear of grade inflation due to which zillions of people are separated by statistically insignificant margins on the tests; and (b) the diversity in school boards, each with its own grading system and policies that make it hard to compare across them.
The only solution is to conduct a common, independent test that truly separates the top 4000 candidates from the rest, while also doing a reasonable job of ranking those 4000 candidates. Now, almost by definition, this means that the test ought to be made hard enough that the majority of candidates score close to zero on it, because any exam has a limited resolving power and this one needs to be calibrated to resolve well among the top 2% of the examinees.The age-old IIT JEE system has gotten this right so far!
Now we have new-fangled ideas doing the rounds about "reducing stress levels" by instituting reforms to the exam process. But how exactly does it help if it does not change the fundamental balance of supply and demand? Sure, we could institute a lottery system to replace the exam thus reducing the "stress levels" of students, but why is that the right thing to do? Wouldn't we rather have people working harder to succeed in a fairer process? All of the recent attempts to make the IIT-JEE "easier" suffers from this kind of myopic thinking.
If we really wanted to reduce stress levels, a good place to start might be to reduce the need to rank people based on the test and focus instead only on selection. Students could be allowed to join without having to choose a major ahead of time, and be provided reasonable freedom to study the major of their choice. This would certainly help reduce the pressure on students by enabling them to put in just enough effort to cross the threshold rather than to go all out to rank highest. (And given the law of diminishing returns, it should be less work to make the top 4000 than to make the top 100.)
It is another matter entirely that the proposed reforms do little to even advance the goal of reducing stress levels. There are now rules in place restricting the number of times a person may appear for the JEE, when he/she may take the exam and so on which would appear to violate the cardinal rule for rulemaking: "Don't make up a rule unless you have to."
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