High percentage cut-offs – its impact on students and quality of education system

By Deepak Lamba

With India’s top Universities reaching impossibly high admission cut-off percentages of 100% for under-graduate courses, the Indian educational system has started resembling a very challenging scenario where everyone advocates the survival of the fittest! However in India – fitness translates only to the marks scored by the students.

Ironically this situation of high cut-offs has been brought about by well intended decisions such as reservation, leniency in correction of Class 12 Board Examination answer sheets & institutes insisting on admitting students of highest quality. There was a time when a student scoring above 75% was considered to be brilliant. Now the times have changed, such that even a student scoring 90% is considered to be of average intelligence.

To understand the reason for such unusually high cut-offs one needs to consider the Indian education system as a whole.

The All India Survey on Higher Education pegs that the number of colleges per lakh population is as low as 25 on national average. While this in itself is alarming, majority of the higher education institutions lack funds to improve infrastructure or faculty. The Delhi University alone receives about 3.5Lakh applications for the 55,000 seats available. This leads to nearly impossible cut-offs for admission.

In an effort to reduce the stress levels of students, the question papers now have more number of objective questions. This leads to inflation in the marking since the objective questions do not allow marks to be deducted if the student has answered correctly. However, this approach fails to evaluate the student’s actual understanding of the subject.

Presently, the private sector accounts for nearly 59 per cent of enrolment in higher education. But the challenge here is that the private institutions are subject to tough regulations with very little flexibility for designing their course curriculum. However, in spite of these limitations some private universities have set new standards in education.

This change in admission landscape has led to unprecedented levels of stress that the students are subjected to. For majority of the students the burden of performing well and making it to the best institution in the country has a profound impact on their mental & psychological health. The current admission procedure does not account for any non-academic competencies of the students. In the words of our former President, late Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam “Creativity in education leads to evolution of self-reliant youth with knowledge & action”. Today’s education system limits this very creativity. Most mainstream courses are designed to cater to textual knowledge, rather than encourage practical and logical thinking. This is especially alarming since students who excel in theoretical exams may not necessarily perform well under pressure on the job or have an innovative problem-solving approach to crisis.

The trend seems to indicate that the high scorers amongst the students prefer only a handful of colleges & universities which excel in faculty & infrastructure. Whereas, majority of the other universities get average to good quality students.

Many a time, the students who do not get admission to colleges of their choice change their course preferences settling for alternatives which may not be to their liking. This automatically affects their performance in the course and later in their vocation. There are also those who seek admission oversees in foreign universities of equal or better caliber. This aside from translating into high expenditure also contributes to brain drain & foreign currency drain for the country.

The problem at hand needs to be addressed at different levels to ensure a change in the current scenario. First & foremost, I believe that the admission process needs to be based on evaluating the students holistically through a skill based test like the SATs (conducted abroad) or an interview procedure. However, the evaluation would have to be done throughout the year to ensure consistent performance.

I would also urge the Government to significantly increase the investment in the universities to address the quality of infrastructure & faculty. This, I believe will change the current scenario of a rat race to secure admission in only the top universities. Also with improvement in the number of quality education seats, the number of students applying to other universities will increase subsequently reducing the cut-offs for all the universities & colleges. This should reduce the impact of the huge reservation in higher education thus leveling the playground for all the students.

Some current challenges which can be addressed in the near future would be for the Indian legislation to change in order to encourage private universities. I would also advice the students to broaden their horizons & look beyond the universities to explore other worthy alternatives.

Some governments have already taken few steps in this regard with states like Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat establishing progressive SPUs (State Private University) Act. Similarly for the students who want to take up law, a number of National Law Universities have been established. The engineering students too have the option of appearing for IIT-JEE exam to enable them to seek admissions in various IITs and other reputable engineering colleges. However, these steps need to be replicated or other alternatives offered in other sectors & states as well. Last but not the least, I believe that we have touched just the tip of the iceberg. A lot more needs to be done to make a dent in the student mindset and the industry as a whole.

About the Author:

Deepak Lamba heads Timesgroup’s education initiative – TimesPro and ET Edge and is designated President - Times Centre For Learning & Times Conferences Ltd. He played a pivotal role in designing and implementing several unique products and services, including Distributed MBA, a first-of-its-kind MBA degree.