There has been a triple whammy in India’s educational world: a question-paper leak in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for undergraduate medical courses; a furore over digitised answer-scripts in the Class XII finals of the Central Board of Secondary Education; and programme breakdowns and cancelled exams in the Common University Entrance Test.
None of this may surprise us. What might do so are certain attempts at rectification. The National Testing Agency approached the Indian air force for help with NEET. The Union education minister called in bank officials to help review the Class XII exam. There is good reason in both cases. Who better than the armed forces to ensure safe transport of NEET questions? The banks collect exam fees and can thus track enrolment or registration. It may still seem bizarre that the education system cannot look after itself but must turn to such improbable agencies to bail it out.
Perhaps this was waiting to happen ever since education came to constitute a ‘system’ — that is to say, when individual institutions were incorporated in a larger order controlled by some higher authority, usually the State. The process has taken place across the world over the last two centuries. It has confronted education with challenges that are not only intellectual and pedagogic but structural and managerial. When the structure expands out of hand, it looks for non-academic props: banks, courts, even the armed forces. Moreover, in this day and age, it inevitably acquires the carapace of a ‘system’ in the electronic sense, a computational ordering.
I trust I am not a luddite. I have joined many online teaching programmes and explored the application of computers in the humanities. I have even argued for more computation in academic management in specific situations. But we cannot confuse the medium for the message. Today computers are swapping places with human educators. Actual pedagogy (the so-called ‘teaching-learning process’) is increasingly geared to computerised delivery: not only as a practical alternative where teachers and infrastructure are scarce, but as an intellectual end, the best way to purvey knowledge.
From ancient times, the standard method of imparting knowledge has been direct communication between mentor and pupil. It is a deeply human, shared activity. The coming of script and print did not affect this understanding. The traditional classroom remains the last great arena of orality. But it has acquired the curiously negative label ‘offline’, as though relegated to some dead end for lacking electronic transmission. A smart classroom is not one with an inspiring teacher and bright pupils: it is a room fitted with computers.
Our topic today is not pedagogy but admissions. More and more courses and institutions, even those at state level, are linking up with vast all-India entrance tests. Such huge exercises can only be conducted electronically. Their subject-matter must be compatible with computerised assessment.
No one in their senses would say that the multiple-choice question is the best means of testing knowledge, let alone thinking prowess. It follows that students selected through such means may not constitute the cross-section of Indian youth most fit to benefit themselves and the nation from the course in question. This is not to denigrate the merit and toil of those who make the grade. But have we ever otherwise assessed the merit of those who do not, who may not even qualify to sit the exam, or afford the fees even if they qualify? On the other hand, medical seats are available at a huge premium for candidates with the means, even if they score zero in NEET.
There is something out of kilter in all these exams that insidiously prompts people to beat the system. The cleanest way of doing so is by inhuman cramming. But with 23 lakh candidates for NEET-UG and 14.5 lakh for JEE Mains, cramming is hardly a surefire strategy. The stage is thus set for every kind of scam, even if there may not be one. What I am talking about is something deeper and subtler: the ingrained possibility of a scam in a system where the evaluation itself cannot distinguish between the honest student and the cheat. The integrity of the exam rests solely on external and mechanical surveillance.
We cannot be sentimentally impractical. It is not easy to find an alternative solution. But we can try approaching the same problems from the opposite perspective. At present, we seem driven by a kind of gigantism, an urge to build ever bigger and more centralised systems, subsuming all local and specialised practices, and themselves subsumed under a single NTA. (Phasing out institutional control over entrance tests at the Indian Statistical Institute is a recent instance.) Each new order is more pervasively computer-reliant than the last. Even online assessment (of recent CBSE fame), conducted by human examiners, effectively turns them into bots to meet the demands of speed and mechanical accuracy.
How about reorienting the same computerised system to address the academic priorities of human educators and the specific academic potential of each human examinee? Instead of making the latter conform to a uniform impersonal norm, could we devise a programme that could evaluate a range of skills and aptitudes? Could there be a choice of questions? Or questions requiring more intensive problem-solving than currently? Or even — shock and horror! — the narrative or ‘essay-type’ question, at least in modified form? In a word, can we introduce a modicum of human granularity into the exercise? Would it be entirely amateurish to say that Artificial Intelligence could come into play here?
These may be impracticable suggestions. If so, it is for the academic community to devise something better. But something needs doing. Student unhappiness (with suicides as its direst outcome) has reached a depth that is making a long callous officialdom take note. Alongside this, scams and technical failures are undermining the system or at the very least people’s faith in it. It is a problem for educators, not policemen, bankers or the armed forces.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University