The selection procedure for admission into the country’s 13 IITs, IIT-BHU Varanasi, Indian School of Mines University, Dhanbad (which together admitted 8,300 students in 2009) and 20 NITs (24,000), currently based on applicants’ performance in the IIT-JEE and AIEEE annual examinations, is in for major overhaul by 2011. Ditto curriculum and course programmes. While AIEEE (written by over 1 million class XII students this year) will also be available online, the IITs may raise the eligibility bar and give weightage to marks obtained in class XII board examinations.
In almost back-to-back meetings of the governing councils of the two most respected engineering/technology education providers (IIT council meeting on October 19 and the first ever NITs council meeting on October 21), the issue of student quality and intake led to spirited debate, prompting Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal to remark that a 80 percent average in class XII should be a precondition for writing IIT-JEE (written by 385,000 students in 2009). Later, after a heavy fusillade of criticism particularly from Nitish Kumar, chief minister of the educa-tionally backward state of Bihar, Sibal withdrew his statement, clarifying that the IIT and NIT councils will determine the appropriate class XII board exam cut-offs.
Since then a three-member committee comprising Union science and technology secretary T. Ramasamy; department of biotechnology secretary, M.K. Bhan and CSIR director-general Samir Brahmachari, has been constit-uted to suggest JEE and IIT curricular reforms. This committee will present its report within three months.
Likewise to suggest AIEEE reform, a committee comprising the directors of NITs Allahabad, Kozhikode and Agartala has been asked to submit a report by January 2010.The committee will examine the possibility of providing the facility of online exams, and also ascertain the root cause of seats in NITs going abegging, despite several rounds of counseling every year.
The unnamed target of these exam and curricular reforms is India’s mush-rooming coaching schools industry, reported to be raking in annual revenues aggregating Rs.30,000 crore. The entrepreneurial response to severe capacity shortages in higher education (only 11 percent of Indian youth in the age group 18-24 enter tertiary educa-tion), academic opinion is unanimous that the power, influence and incomes of coaching schools need to be reduced. They are routinely accused of selling unrealistic hope to students, and inducing them to spend time at coaching centres learning how to crack entrance exams, rather than study in higher secondaries. As a result, when they enter IITs and NITs, students tend to have inadequate understanding of concepts which adversely impacts the overall quality of learning/teaching processes. “This is very true. The best way to counter the cram culture of coaching schools is to give greater weightage to board examination results. Moreover there should be a viva voce or interview exam as well,” says Dr. P.V. Indiresan, former director of IIT-Madras.
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Yet the top brass of coaching companies — many of whom have acquired global reputations — are unfazed. They believe that if additional weightage is given to the class XII exam, it will still be good business, as students will sign up for the class XII board exam preparation. “The reason coaching schools are thriving is because schools — even the so-called top schools of the country — don’t teach students the essentials required by IITs and NITs. We’re supplementing what is taught in schools,” says D.K. Goel, chairman of the Delhi-based FIITJEE, one of India’s largest coaching schools with 33 study centres and 23,000 students.
Yet even as the coaching schools industry is the unnamed target of Indian academia, it can’t be wished away until the root problem — the massive demand-supply gap in higher education, especially quality higher education — is bridged. Until that denouement, India’s enterprising coaching school edupreneurs will not only survive, but thrive.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)