About 20 years ago, when the TN government abolished entrance exams for professional courses (engineering in particular), i thought that was a stupid move. I thought entrance exams serve to establish quality. The age was young. In retrospect, i think my reaction 20 years ago was because it was during the preparation for the entrance exam that i understood many nuances in the concepts and learnt to apply them as well. I had the 'fortune' of attending a coaching class, which i think did a good job because i eventually got into a college of high repute - whether this is a correlation or a causation remains unknown though. These resulted in the notion that scrapping entrance exam was a bad idea. However, 20 years later, having seen at least some parts of the society - locally and globally - i cannot, but be amused by my ignorance at that young age. Let me elaborate.
The central idea of entrance exams, as i see it, was to filter students to be admitted in the programme. That is, the number of seats available was far lower than the number of students competing for the seats. So, we needed a metric, for only practical purposes, to filter off candidates. Entrance exam score was the metric. However, now i realise how flawed this idea is because of the underlying notions in it:
(1) the current board exams are incapable of helping to select candidates for professional education, (2) the entrance exam is the perfect exam that can guarantee good professionals, (3) if we get "sub-par" students, we, as educators are not interested in investing our time to help them achieve their aspirations.
The other aspect that i was sensitive to, but not a large extent was the accessibility of the coaching centers, which,in my case, played an important role. There are umpteen number of people who cannot afford a coaching centre for entrance exam. It has almost turned out to be the case that the probability of getting through the entrance exam with good score improves significantly with attending coaching centers. Is this right? Are we saying, as a society, we will encourage and support only those who are able to attend coaching centers? Are coaching centers imparting anything of educational value other than such exam preparation? Are we to stand and encourage such mechanisms in a society?
20 years ago, i didn't have the maturity to think about these aspects. But i do now. Entrance exams are waste of time and resources. This should be invested in the foundational education system such that we groom tomorrow's citizens.
