On a humid morning this past week, headlines in a range of India's top newspapers highlighted what most Indian school students constantly labour and persevere to overcome: The obsession India's colleges have with cut-off marks for admission. As an alumnus of the Shri Ram College of Commerce, which this year required a stratospheric cut-off mark of 100 per cent for non-commerce stream students to secure a seat in the college, I was particularly piqued by the storm of responses from India's elite, ranging from the frenzied and harried to the blasé and complacent.
What is obvious is that there is a need, but not the capacity, for a more holistic application process. The obsession with cut-off marks is understandable, but a touch too convenient for educational institutions. For students, cut-offs are their entry visa into the larger educational process in India. For educational institutions, the higher the cut-off marks, the greater the claim to prestige in the larger educational ecosystem.
SYSTEM OF EXCLUSION
This model is dated and unfair to both students and to society at large. With our educational system continuing to emphasise performance as measured by examinations, memorisation and marks will persist as poor proxies for measuring “educational” outcomes. Yet, as the political scientists Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur have remarked, “The fact that the system nonetheless produces a noticeable number of high quality students has to do with the sheer number of students and the Darwinian struggle at the high school to get admission into the few good institutions.”
Or consider the question posed by Stefan H. Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School, based on his recent study of Mumbai's dabbawallas: “People with average skills and education can do extraordinary things. Perhaps there is a bigger lesson here. India has many people, but are all of them being used to their fullest potential?”
This is precisely the moot point. The Indian educational system appears to be based more on systems and mechanisms of exclusion rather than inclusion: Whether it is entrance examinations or board examination cut-offs, or even the UPSC's system of choosing India's future bureaucrats, we as a society appear to be taking the “lazy way out”, by using these tools and filters as means to exclude rather to select; to rebuff and repulse rather than to select, groom and train.
To paraphrase Thomke: Is our educational system doing the best to select and train our students to reach a high degree of their potential?
HOW US MODEL WORKS
Salient in this context is the model of admissions followed by the decentralised US higher education system — a superb example of research excellence, undergraduate teaching, and democratic access to higher education. Consider what I would call the four building blocks of how the best American institutions assess and admit students into the groves of academia. First, a range of standardised tests — whether it is the SAT or the ACT at the undergraduate level, or the GRE, GMAT, LSAT or other allied tests at the post-graduate level — are used to generate a quantitative score to assess the mathematical, reading, verbal comprehension and cognitive skills of students.
These scientifically designed standardised tests are periodically revised and revamped. Second, the emphasis on writing essays for admissions evaluates the ability of the student to express himself or herself in ways that are not captured by high school exams, assessments or mark-sheets. Essays are as valid for undergraduate admissions as they are for applying to do research at the PhD level for most American institutions of higher education. In short, whether a student wants to pursue a PhD to study nanotechnology at Stanford or to pursue an undergraduate course at a selective liberal arts college such as, say, Wellesley or Swarthmore, the admissions process simply does not compromise on assessing the ability of that student to communicate his ideas to an audience in writing.
Indubitably, communicating is a key skill that will prove useful to anyone in any career — so why should it not be a factor (though admittedly not the factor) in giving the student an inclusive, participatory voice in the process? Third, the emphasis on letters of recommendation showcases the importance of incorporating subjective (but hopefully reasonably fair if not empathetic) assessments by those who teach or supervise that student. Finally, the overall history of the grades and exams of a student over a period of time provides a trajectory of overall progress.
In sum, these four parameters capture a large array of the effects and outcomes that education ought to seek to attain. These parameters offer a credible way of assessing the overall gestalt of the individual student as a human being captured by a range of measures over time.
To push an HR metaphor, this model of a holistic admissions process is not very far off from a “360 degree performance appraisal”. This process does not as much brutally and summarily eliminate a student as it serves to evaluate a candidate for admission. American admissions officers will tell you that oftentimes, a single student's file can be debated and read by at least three different officers over the course of time before a decision is made.
At the level of MBA, Master's or PhD admissions, other graduate students have also been known to read incoming applications and provide inputs to admissions committees.Telephone calls and in-person interviews, at times, supplement the inputs going into this process. All this is not only fair, but a humane — albeit complicated and tedious — process. Yet the results of this Western emphasis on the individual are present for all of us to see: To date, the American model of higher education continues to remain the world's envy.
LESSONS FOR INDIA
Admittedly, this holistic model of the admissions process is tedious, and complex and nuanced — but it is ultimately fair and rigorous — both to the student as well as educational institutions seeking a certain kind of candidate with a general matrix of traits, aptitudes and gifts.
Without diagnosing the roots of the institutional malaise in Indian higher education or proposing some sort of overhauling of the modus operandi of our rote-memorisation based system of teaching in schools, India may continue to witness episodes of cut-offs going to the 100 per cent mark level.
This is unreasonable. Yet it need not be the case — if we would but learn the appropriate lessons from the example of the US higher educational system.
(The author is Senior Educational Advisor at the United States-India Educational Foundation, New Delhi. The views are personal
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