Sunil Sethi: Marking up the mark sheets

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A virtually unheard-of occurrence for college admissions in Delhi University made headlines and unleashed shock waves this summer: a leading college demanded a score of 96 to 100 per cent for entrance to an honours degree in commerce. Was this fantasy, a joke or a case of examination marks keeping pace with price inflation?

Actually, it suggests a malaise that gives a heads-up to rote learning over education, a triumph of deadbeat conservatism over innovation. An exceptionally high score (not to speak of a bull’s eye hit) was once regarded as a reward for path-breaking originality and excellence, heralding the arrival of a prodigy perhaps; but when exceptions are increasingly the norm, then it’s time to question how students are taught and judged — or how the goalposts for judging performance have changed.

Two other trends were visible during college admissions this year. Seduced by the numbers game, some colleges dispensed with the practice of holding personal interviews altogether while, at the other end, the media reported an inordinately high rush of school graduates from smaller towns seeking admission to Delhi colleges. The first indicates campus faculties in the grip of a number-crunching mania so intense that a personal interface with a student is considered a waste of time. And the second, a growing hiatus between perceived education standards in mainline centres and elsewhere that only reinforces a blind herd migration.

In a country where 63 per cent population is under 30 and which churns out two million graduates (including 600,000 engineers) from 400 universities each year, the pioneering spirit, of breaking free to take paths less trodden, is discouraged. India is said to have the largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world but a generation of conventional crammers and plodders in their twenties predominates. There are no Mark Zuckerbergs or Sabeer Bhatias on the horizon. The lack is obvious in other areas of public life. Rahul Gandhi, just past his 41st birthday and the preferred choice for the PM’s job by many in the Congress party, will succeed like movie star Ranbir Kapoor — by virtue of being a fourth-generation successor to the family firm.

In her recent book Geek Nation, award-winning British Indian science journalist Angela Saini blames the “relentlessly hierarchical” nature of Indian education that makes it difficult for students to ask questions or challenge authority, resulting in a tough, but purely theoretical, exam system. “The problem is that the best scientists and engineers are not always the best at passing exams. Albert Einstein made his observations on relativity in his spare time while working as a lowly patent clerk.”

Not long ago, Ms Saini, who holds a Masters in engineering from Oxford, spent some days at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, interacting with students and professors. Her report is an eye-opener. “I was an engineering student once,” she writes, “but I’ve never seen an atmosphere like it. Hardly anyone plays sports, social mixers are unheard of and a lot of the boys still have trouble talking to girls... Between the lecture room and grey main hall are huddles of students, cramming for the exams in a week’s time.” She meets frustrated professors unable to get students to think creatively and stressed-out nerds fixated on high-paid jobs in MNCs, so they can earn salaries ten times of what their fathers did. Accustomed to the robot-like drilling of coaching centres to gain admission, “hardly any IIT students stay on to do research or further degrees ... only a tiny proportion are interested in careers in a laboratory”. Later, when she visits top IT firms her impression is confirmed by low investments in new research or cutting-edge technology; thousands of engineering graduates ended up as drone-like programmers providing software services for Scottish pensioners and suchlike.

Is this a nation of geeks or drones? A little learning, it is said, is a dangerous thing. So is the wrong kind of learning. Marking up the mark sheets at 100 per cent for undergraduate admissions has disaster writ large on the blackboard.