Meddling with success

The Indian Minister of Human Resource development, Kabil Sibal had, on May 28, announced that from 2013, aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under a new format of common entrance test, which will also take the plus-two board results into consideration. The minister had claimed that it was approved without dissent at a council consisting of the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs. 

His announcement led to a firestrom of criticism from the entire IIT group of directors and alumni for trying to change a system, which had made IIT a global brand.The fact is that for the past five decades, the entrance examination for IITs, called IIT-JEE, has been the gold standard in the country for its fairness, effectiveness and lack of corruption. To get through the IIT-JEE meant that you had become a part of an elite through your own merits wherever you came from.

Christopher Hayes, an American author in his book “Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy,” describes a similar system “It was at Hunter” he says, “that I absorbed the open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism that is the guiding ethos of the current American ruling class. What animates the school is a collective delight in the talent and energy of its students and a general feeling of earned superiority. In 1982 a Hunter alumnus profiled the school in a New York magazine article called “The Joyful Elite” and identified its “most singular trait” as the “exuberantly smug loyalty of its students.”That loyalty emanates from the deeply held conviction that Hunter embodies the meritocratic ideal as much as any institution in the country. Unlike elite colleges, which use all kinds of subjective measures—recommendations, résumés, writing samples, parental legacies and interviews—in deciding who gains admittance, entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected. If Michael Bloomberg’s daughter took the test and didn’t pass, she wouldn’t get in. There are only a handful of institutions left in the country about which this can be said.”

IIT’s in India are one of those rare institutions in the world where it can still be said that entrance is based purely on merit. It is a shining example in the world where no amount of lobbying or political power can gain entrance and where true merit is the only criterion that prevails. Hence the graduates of these schools have what Chris calls the "open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism" and the deeply held conviction  of their own singular merits and abilities. And it is this and the training they received while at IIT, that has led them to pinnacles of achievement.

In these discussions there is another element that most people overlook – the democratizing nature of this approach. Any body can apply for admission- there are no requirements of status in society, no filters of whether you can write or speak English with an Oxford accent or know how to eat with a fork and knife or have a father that went to the same school. The only thing you need is your ability to meet the tough standards set up for the admission.

As Chris points out that “because it is public and free, the school pulls kids from all over the city, many of whom are first-generation Americans, the children of immigrant strivers from Korea, Russia and Pakistan. Half the students have at least one parent born outside the United States. For all these reasons Hunter is, in its own imagination, a place where anyone with drive and brains can be catapulted from the anonymity of working-class outer-borough neighborhoods to the inner sanctum of the American elite. “

It is true that in recent years, a number of test preparation schools have mushroomed that offer to train aspiring students for the IIT-JEE and some of them are quite pricy thus theoretically still providing an edge to the richer elements of the Indian society. But fortunately a number of NGO’s have grown which take students from the slums and train them as well. I wrote of one of these efforts, "The will to succeed" in my blog some time ago.


IIT students have demonstrated the same career graph-they have led the digital revolution and a large number of Silicon valley startups have IIT degrees in their back pack. They have contributed to their alma maters setting up various schools of development in their IIT. Today there is no IIT which does not have an alumni sponsored program or school.


Resistance to this ministerial meddling will grow and this has already started. The Senates of the IIT-Kanpur and Delhi have rejected the Centre's 'one-nation one-test' proposal and decided to conduct its own entrance exam from next year. Other IIT’s have similar reactions as well and will soon have Senate resolutions mirroring the IIT-Kanpur resolution.

The fact is that IIT system needs to be replicated in other reaches of our education system. The proposal of Kabil Sibal only manages to destroy a perfectly working system for IIT but does little to address the rest of the educational system. He needs to retreat and listen to the IIT directors, students and alumni.