The Hindu : Open Page: "The entrance exams are the biggest fraud perpetrated on the rural, poor and girl students of this country. Students studying in rural schools are not exposed to coaching classes run by private institutions.
The present admission procedure also discriminates between boys and girls. More girls are passing out in +2 exams than boys. But more boys get college admissions than girls. How is this possible if fairness is followed in admissions?
The process followed by the government must eliminate these three biases — urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor and boys vs. girls. Only when these three discriminations, planned or unplanned, are eliminated we can certainly say that education is for all and it is purely based on merit. Till then higher education will be biased in favour of the rich-urban-boys.
Many colleges including BITS, Pilani, have no entrance exams and they admit students based on the marks scored in the +2 exams. BITS, Pilani, is following the normalising method for more than 30 years now and it has been very successful in admitting students purely on merit. The whole world knows the quality of education at BITS, Pilani. Normalising neutralises the differences in marks obtained by students belonging to various Central and State boards. The marks obtained by the topper of a particular board exam are normalised to 100 per cent and the marks of all the students of that particular board exam get adjusted accordingly. For example if 96 per cent is the top mark, then if a student has obtained 90 per cent, his marks are normalised to (90/96) x 100 which will be equal to 93.75 per cent.
What is the way out? The government should ban all entrance exams, include a paper along with +2 exam if it wants to test the students' general prowess and base all admissions only on +2 marks. If it still wants to have a separate entrance exam then it should conduct a common all India test and all colleges and universities should use the resulting ranks as the basis for admissions. There is a lot of confusion with multiple entrance exams mushrooming with separate exams conducted by state, central, medical, engineering, aided colleges, self financed colleges, deemed universities, for government quota, for management quota, etc. "
Friday, October 22, 2004
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1 comment:
Common entrance exams like JEE, CAT, GATE would serve the right purpose. It’s upon the universities to accept those as standard exams and consider the admissions based on merit in these exams.
The exams at +2 level are total bogus, considering the current practice, and you cannot rely on those for good students. If you are competitive enough, I guess the person would as well do great in the entrance exams.
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