An Elegy To The JEE

My Facebook feed, on the morning of January 30, was overtaken by RIPs (Rest in Peace). These were not mass tributes for Gandhi, but condolences for the dreaded Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), conducted by the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

To reduce the stress levels of the parents of aspiring engineers, Kapil Sibal abolished the JEE and arm twisted the IITs into participating in one common entrance test. But if JEE is indeed so stressful, then why are its victims mourning for it? Why did I, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur who entered the institute in 2001 after three years of painstaking preparation and two attempts, experience such an acute and personal sense of loss on reading about the end of the JEE?

JEE is not just one exam less in the landscape of hundreds of exams that aspiring engineers, scientists and architects appear for. JEE is one of the very few institutions in India that has managed to escape the general decline in standards and integrity since Independence.

Growing up in an era where admission into most colleges was available “through the back door”, JEE stood apart as the test that could only be cracked with scrupulous hard work. As my father, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, frequently told me while I was preparing, “no amount of money or political power can get you past the JEE”.

The IITs prepare meticulously for the JEE relying on trustworthy organizations such as the Currency Note Press, Nasik, for printing papers; reliable schools and colleges as centres for the exam, and so on. It is for this reason that over the last 50 odd years, JEE papers have never got leaked except in 1997. Even then, many people joked that the difficulty of questions was such that one needed to put in many hours of solid preparation even to cheat!

The questions that are asked in JEE are legendary in their own right. People often underestimate the skill and depth of knowledge that goes into framing good questions— questions that test how well students understand the subject matter, rather than how well they have crammed digests and textbooks. The Indian exam system at all levels of education places a low value on such conceptual understanding. How many of us bother to look at class XII papers once we are through? Yet, each year, many of us look up new JEE question papers while some actually try to solve them for the sheer thrill of it, for matching wits with our former professors.

The JEE is not a question paper put together by jaded, dull faculty of the kind frequently found in our universities. It is a product of genius and creativity, it is something that teases rather than torments, entices rather than bores. For instance, even now, a decade since I cleared JEE, whenever I have to teach probability to someone, I instinctively think back to fascinating JEE problems involving loaded dices, or letters with part of the address missing, requiring an agile mind to route it to its most likely destination.

Of course, the JEE is not perfect, it could have been made more accessible— by conducting it in many more languages, for instance.

Kapil Sibal’s argument to cut down entrance tests is not fundamentally misplaced. Multiple tests undoubtedly place students from poor families at a disadvantage. Yet, must the goal of reducing the number of tests be carried out by abolishing the only examination which has worked well for several decades? Instead of abolishing JEE, could we not instead generalize it to cover a wider group of universities? I am sceptical of the idea of having just one exam for all universities for several reasons— for instance what happens to those who fall ill on the very day of that sole exam?

There are also larger problems with our educational system that an entrance exam like the JEE cannot solve. If school level education is broken, then economically well off students will always have an advantage because they can afford coaching classes. Killing the JEE still leaves this advantage untouched. Thus, what exactly do we achieve by abolishing JEE? On the other hand, the damage is tangible and intangible. Future generations will not even have a standard against which they can compare the sordid tests that pass for entrance examinations these days.

The JEE is like Socrates in many respects. Intolerant of sloppy thinking, the JEE relents only when one hungers for it the way one craves for breath under water. Like Socrates, once JEE lets a student in, it blesses the student not only with wisdom, but also confidence, to think unconventionally, to trust oneself, and to take risks. I have strayed far from engineering since my IIT days, yet whenever I am in a difficult spot, I derive inspiration from the fact of having persisted with, and cleared the JEE .

Looking at the wave of sadness that greeted Kapil Sibal’s decision, many people are wondering why IITians are making such a fuss over an exam. We are not making a fuss over an exam; we are mourning the death of a stern, but fair, and ultimately beloved teacher, at the hands of a government which knows not what damage it does.

Aniket Aga is a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University.