NEETLY Messy

Thanks to reports of the alleged leakage of papers for NEET, there is much controversy around these important entrance tests. From media to Parliament to the streets, various people – commentators, politicians, and students – are using all platforms to vociferously air their view. The entity responsible for the tests, National Testing Agency (NTA), is under fire, and a high-power committee is looking into all aspects of the tests and their organisation.

Hopefully, it will address basic issues. For instance, is a central test necessary? If so, should it be a single one, or two/multiple tests (like JEE)? Is there a more meaningful way of assessment instead of multiple-answer tests, which cannot gauge aptitude or attitude, and encourage rote learning rather than critical thinking? While multiple-choice tests provide an easy way to deal with the massive number of candidates, can new tech and AI provide a way of as easily dealing with essay-type answers?

Present entry tests for JEE, NEET, etc., devalue schools: for lakhs of students, coaching institutions are far more important than school, and final/board examinations are practically irrelevant for those seeking a medical or engineering degree. One way of reversing this undesirable trend is to use the board examination results as the sole – or major – criterion for admission to all university courses. The problem of comparability of results of different boards in an age of marks inflation can be handled by using a percentile, instead of marks, for common all-India ranking. Thus, for priority in admission, one can start with, say, the top one per cent, from each board; then, the next one per cent, and so on. Over a fairly short period, this approach should result in considerably upgrading the quality of school education across the country.

Ideally, each institution could even give different weights to the percentile ranking in each subject: medical colleges may want to give greater weightage to biology, while an engineering one may do so for math or physics. Each institution might do an interview of short-listed candidates for final selection, in which subjective assessment – very different from bias – will play a role. 

The NEET mess continues to excite media, but the government’s Economic Survey raises issues linked to a different “messy” operation, involving bowel movement. With countries pointing fingers at each other for accelerating global warming, the report points to the West’s culpability through the use of toilet paper. Whether responsibility for climate change should be attributed to the West’s historical contribution, or to the now-growing carbon emissions by China and India, may be a bone of contention. However, it is indisputable that Western lifestyles involving toilet paper usage results in environmental damage. As a report quoted in the Survey notes, one roll of toilet paper uses 1.5 pounds of virgin wood, 37 gallons of water and 1.3 Kwh of electricity. It urges Westerners to learn from developing nations and adopt a more nature-friendly lifestyle. Of course, with more Indians now consuming toilet paper, we may need behaviour change here too! Also, amongst our leaders, who extol green cover and attend tree-planting functions, but permit the mass chopping of forests – right from Nicobar to Aravalli to Uttarakhand.

Back to NEET: maybe the ideal future is about centralised tests, online learning, AI bots as teachers, and no schools. Coaching classes will, of course, continue to prosper.