Column | Both NEET and CBSE Fiascos Are Symptoms Of Something Older: Krishna Kumar

Over 22 lakh candidates attempt the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). This year, this mega-test had to be cancelled and repeated this summer after a paper leak was noticed and acknowledged just in time. Its excessive dependence on digital technology contributed to the leak.

And just when the NEET was cancelled, another instance of technological adventurism occurred over the Grade 12 exam conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). It decided to adopt on-screen evaluation, which required millions of pages of students’ answer sheets to be scanned. The haste to declare the result compounded the numerous problems that scanning presented. Errors led to widespread resentment among schools and students.

Both the NEET and the CBSE fiascos are instances of a gung-ho attitude to digital technology. They are also symptoms of something older.

The NEET was originally imagined some two decades ago as a solution to the problems posed by the multiplicity of entry tests across the states, but the NEET proved a difficult reform to manage. The agency that conducts it lacks the academic and managerial capacity to conduct a national-level exam. The National Testing Agency (NTA) has a skeletal set-up with no institutional capacity of its own. On account of a mostly floating staff, the NTA also lacks institutional memory of its repeated lapses.

Technology was expected to make up the difference. Over the years, staggering amounts have been spent to make school classrooms ‘smart’. Computers were used to conduct mass tests to increase efficiency and to avert familiar mishaps like paper leaks. The opposite happened. Paper leaks and dubious evaluation increased. The only beneficiaries were ed-tech companies. All over the world, ed-tech companies appreciate the captive market that schools and colleges provide. Imagine the satisfaction of getting orders to make lakhs of classrooms smart or to supply laptops. Smart classrooms and other enforced digital practices have marginalised teachers, alienating them from children.

As a result of such missteps, the higher education system today is facing a predicament. It can’t easily stop the constant flow of the consequences of erroneous reforms made over recent years. Nor can it retrieve the strengths that the system had gained over several decades. These gains have been sacrificed in the rush to imitate foreign systems, especially the American, in the name of globalisation and modernisation. Most of the changes made were opposed by teachers, but their resistance counted for nothing.

A Larger Malaise

The crisis related to the testing is only a symptom of a larger malaise—the steep descent of the higher education sector in India.

This can be attributed to a host of causes: the loss of autonomy of universities; the gradual erosion of the role of the states in favour of the Centre; reckless privatisation and the growing commercialisation of private institutions, the increasing regimentation and standardisation reflected in an overreliance on multiple-choice questions (MCQs); and the hollowing out of institutions of higher learning.

The biggest challenge is perhaps the loss of autonomy of universities and the shrinking role of states in this sector.

Increasing standardisation, as represented by the NEET and the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), is the first tool for the Centre to assume the sole power to determine what should be taught and who should be taught. MCQs represent the second tool of standardisation.

The poor quality of the questions apart, the idea that a few hundred MCQs can reveal who among millions have the hidden potential to serve as doctors is a silly fantasy. Similarly, a test consisting of MCQs that will tell us who should receive undergraduate education is an affront to universities. Coaching outfits drill their clients to ‘crack’ NEET and other similar exams which cannot handle the diversity of languages and the inequality that is endemic to India’s social landscape.

Many state universities are still resisting the CUET’s imposition, but that doesn’t mitigate the harm it has already done to central universities. Having lost all authority to select students, they have become delivery shops. They had already lost control over the curriculum to a substantial extent. What else is there to lose?

The homogenisation trend is also reflected in the shrinking role of the states. The current period is a time when a concerted attempt to establish a command-and-control system—leaving no room for the states—has led to frequent breakdowns. While earlier attempts to create national frameworks and systems left plenty of room for the states and institutions to exercise their autonomy under the provision of concurrency that the Constitution offers, the new attempts reflect an extreme kind of centralisation.

Systemic Breakdown

The higher education sector is also under threat from a problem that long predates all of this: the shortage of teachers. In colleges and universities across the country, sanctioned posts have remained vacant for years. In the best of institutions, the vacancy rate has hovered around 40 per cent. In provincial colleges, following the example set by central universities, state governments chose to ignore the problem and let staff strength drain to one-fifth or below. How did institutions manage the routine with such a severe shortage of teachers? They did this by recruiting ad hoc teachers and guest teachers, and by using doctoral students as teachers. This style of management became normal.

In the past two years or so, some institutions have witnessed bulk appointments, marked by ideological filtration and, in some cases, corruption. Ideology was the driving force behind the systemic damage done to the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). But the JNU is hardly an isolated case of concerted political interjection in the functioning of institutions. From the undergraduate curriculum to research, nothing has been spared. The dignity of academic work has been violated. Students can sense trouble, but they don’t know its scale or its history. Crowded classes, teachers pushing an incoherent syllabus and library budget cuts are signs of a systemic breakdown.

As a result of these missteps, the system has squandered the strengths it had gathered over a long period of struggle with limited resources. Today, it is sharply divided—between impoverished public universities and costly private universities. Neither of the two is doing well. A handful of islands are left, but even in these islands, the general loss of hope looms large and not merely among students from underprivileged backgrounds. Suicide rates have continued to rise; this year’s NEET incident took an extra toll, but the stress on students is not confined to those appearing for competitive exams. Those who can are fleeing abroad, for courses they might have taken at home, had these courses not been hollowed out.

Rebuilding the System

Under today’s dire circumstances, moving forward means looking back to locate the junctures where wrong turns were made. Some of these wrong turns involved extreme and hastily executed changes. Letting higher education become a business need not have meant stifling control over public institutions. Similarly, encouragement of engineering and management education need not have paralleled the erosion of humanities and social sciences.

Rebuilding the system after such extensive damage will require three key steps: acknowledgement, planning and financing. All three seem unlikely to be carried out just now. Perhaps a citizens’ commission, backed by a few states, can start by taking stock and planning salvage action. If such a thing happens, it will revive and reinvigorate concurrency.

In the meantime, centralised testing through the NEET and the CUET would have to be reversed. Both are dependent on mechanical marking of MCQs. As a method of selection, this has discredited itself. Abandoning it will bring great relief to a vast cohort of stressed youngsters, their parents and schools. Indeed, school education has also suffered the consequences of ideologically inspired and technologically framed curriculum planning. MCQs have become a cultural trope of destructive, anti-teacher pedagogy. Moving away from MCQ-based examinations will constitute a major reconstructive step towards restoring sanity in teaching and teachers’ lives.

(Views expressed are personal)

Krishna Kumar Former Director, National Council Of Educational Research And Training

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)