The skilling is killing the education

While spawning a billion-dollar coaching industry, JEE has affected the quality of India's talent pool by solely focusing on being an 'objective' measure

Indian agriculture gambles with the monsoon, and the great Indian middle class (GIMC) gambles with the examinations, to quote Ashok Mody. JEE is the big lottery in this milieu, and an IIT admission is the jumbo prize. Like any good gambler, the GIMC wants to improve its odds of winning this jumbo prize. With the hype and hoopla around it drowning out almost everything else, most bets are on the JEE, due to which it has become a high-stakes `measuring stick’, with the belief that it is an `objective’ measuring stick that isolates the grain from the chaff. It is a hard task to convince anyone that it ain’t so.

Economics tells us that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, also called Goodhart’s Law. More specifically, whenever an incentive is attached to a measurement, there is perversion. The shape of this perversion is the Rs 20,000 crore (estimates of Rs 60,000 crore are also made), teach-to-the-test JEE coaching industry, a significant part of the Indian economy. This is only to produce about 16,000 engineers annually in the 25-institute-strong IIT system. And on the scale of `perversion,’ it costs about Rs 2,000 crore to `educate’ this lot in their chosen undergraduate discipline. This teach-to-the-test industry is well entrenched and conducts the lives of more than 30 lakh students every year. A large fraction of the nearly 10 lakh students that write the JEE exam are forced to make sacrifices to improve the odds for the lottery prize, which has incredibly low odds. Up to four years of childhood (focus on the prize), breadth of learning (waste of time), laboratory and hands-on skills (lab is the poor cousin to the `problem-solving’ sessions) are given up. This creates a much-lamented but never-studied distortion field that extends beyond JEE coaching and the coach.

Let us pick up on two primary effects of the aforementioned distortion field in the IITs. First, there is significant student disinterest, especially in the less popular disciplines. For many of these students, learning the `chosen’ discipline (almost always determined by the JEE rank and not an inherent interest) is rarely the aim, and hence apathy towards these courses is often explicitly conveyed; absenting from the lectures, not following up on the material that is taught, not doing assigned homework, etc. is de rigueur. Second, the pedagogical expectation from the instructors is that they continue the coaching institutes’ teaching model of handholding every step of the way. That it shouldn’t be at this level is a very difficult case to make to the students.

Here is a knock-on effect of the preceding: Each IIT makes an enormous effort to define an ideal curriculum for each discipline and assign competent instructors to the courses. These instructors expect intellectual engagement from the students in their class. Any pedagogy expert will tell you that learning, especially in college-level science and engineering, is best performed through inquiry, experimentation, and self-discovery. This is achieved by the instructors providing thematic outlines in lectures, assigning reading material and homework, and the students diligently following up. This in turn requires an honest (no copying, googling, or ChatGPT-ing) and concentrated effort from the student. If done right, this creates a virtuous cycle of positive feedback between the teacher and the students and could make the IITs a hive of intellectual ferment and engineering innovation. But alas, the double whammy of apathy and conditioning of the instructor and instruction expectations by that distortion field has taken out the appetite for such an effort from the student. Instead, we have a vicious cycle of teachers straining to keep the system honest in content delivery and in evaluation. The instructor's effort thus shifts to designing evaluation processes that elicit a modicum of honest effort from the student while the evaluation methods do not strain them; with growing class sizes, the latter is a real concern. This in turn drives the students to `efficient exam preparation, i.e., learn-to-the-test, and become efficient examinees where exam performance is the sole objective.

The natural question then is: since the students do not particularly care for the core subjects that they are enrolled in, what do they do? The answer is in placement, with many students opting for non-core jobs—more than 50% in most departments. And they expend a significant amount of effort in `acquiring other skills—programming, certification in finance, event organisation, organisational positions, etc.

Here another economic theory is at play: the students play a signalling game, like in Spence’s education game, except that the effort of the student is not in achieving a specific grade point performance but in acquiring a set of bullet points for their resume that can be used to seek jobs in their chosen non-core field. This explains the packed social calendar in many of the IITs; even the week before the end-semester examination will have a 'loud activity’. The kicker, though, is the trickledown effect of this phenomenon, with students from many other institutions mimicking the bullet-point-seeking activities with institutional support, which may even be provided as a point of pride—we too can do what the IITs do.

I will end with a caveat. The preceding describes the dominant trait and is the subject of many a bull session when faculty meet over tea, coffee, or something else. There are, of course, students who buck these general rules of behaviour and are a joy to interact with. Although a small percentage, they do provide the sustenance fodder to help keep the system doing what it is expected to be doing, albeit significantly less effectively than it could have had that distortion field not been present.

(The writer teaches at IIT Mumbai)