Pahom is the protagonist in Tolstoy’s parable, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ 1 In the story, Pahom exerts himself so much to plough more land – he had been promised he would get as much land as he could plough in a day – that he collapses and dies without getting to savour the fruits of his exertions. Are we in danger of converting the best of our youth into Pahoms?
On 12 March 2019 the US woke up to the news that: “Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents” had been charged in a college entry fraud.2 This year it was India’s turn to be shaken and stirred. We did it on an even more lavish scale and most people were justifiably outraged by the revelations of paper-leakages, postponements and perfidy in the conduct of a variety of life-determining academic entrance examinations. Immediately after these events, we were treated to a vast outpouring of solutions, including stricter controls, sacking of the examining authorities and systemic overhauls of the type and geographic coverage of these exams. I am afraid these cures are akin to using hot-water bottles and homeopathy for a cancer that is gnawing at the vitals of our next generation. One might have a moment of hesitation in junking our soul-destroying system of entrance examinations for higher education, if they served a greater social, economic or moral purpose. As we shall see, they do just the opposite, exacting a terrible toll on all three of these greater goods.
The only way to overcome the problems these exams cause is to eliminate them – apart from a minimal capability check – from the pride of place they enjoy in the process of admission to institutes of higher education and professional colleges. Before coming to the cure, let’s examine their fundamental failings.
Three tests that entrance tests fail
How about giving entrance tests a taste of testing? I did and they flunked at predicting future success, on being even minimally efficient as well as in basic fairness.
Predicting Success
The least one might expect from entrance tests is that they predict future success in the profession for which they are screening individuals. To understand why they don’t it is important to review a few facts about ability tests used for admissions. The ones we encounter most frequently check for achievement, aptitude, intelligence or some combination of these. “Achievement tests attempt to assess what a person has learned following a specific course of instruction… [A]ptitude tests attempt to evaluate a student’s potential for learning rather than how much a student has already learned… [An] intelligence test measures general ability. Like aptitude tests, intelligence tests attempt to predict future performance. However, such tests predict generally and broadly, as opposed to aptitude tests, which typically predict potential in a specific area such as math, science, or music… Clearly, achievement, aptitude, and intelligence are highly interrelated.”3
Most entrance tests in India measure scholastic achievement (in the sense used above). As such, they are little more than turbo-charged board exams, though standardized on a country-wide basis. What they tell us (provided there is no cheating) is that the applicant knows Physics, Chemistry or whatever other subject is targeted. Only the rashest of reasoners would conclude that these scores predict an outstanding engineer or doctor or business executive in the future. Questioning achievement tests as predictors of work success should not lead India to shift to aptitude tests of the kind used in other countries. No aptitude test used for entrance claims “…to be measuring intellectual capacities such as intelligence, creativity, receptivity to new ideas, or the ability to see conceptual relationships. It only claims to measure the probability that a student will do well in college.” 4 Intelligence tests too would not be a worthwhile option for our college admissions. It is true that intelligence plays a role in career performance. However, the tiny score variations that can make the difference between admission and rejection to an elite institute cannot be correlated with differentials in the general intelligence available for use on the job and certainly not with actual career achievements. Moreover, super-intelligence isn’t sufficient for corporate success. A lot more is needed to become a successful entrepreneur or corporate leader or even a creative knowledge worker.
There are a couple of other reasons that are fatal to the validity of entrance tests. “[In] many situations involving uncertainty – and college choice is certainly such a situation – the likely outcomes of many selections are essentially equivalent. Or, to put it differently, the degree of uncertainty in selection makes it impossible to know which excellent student will be better than which other excellent student. In other words, admission to selective colleges already is a lottery, though people pretend that it isn’t.”5 Then there is the luck of the draw of mood, health and alertness at the time the test is taken. “Construct-irrelevant variance occurs when scores are influenced by factors irrelevant to the construct. For example, a test of intelligence might be influenced by reading comprehension, test anxiety, or illness.”6
Efficient process
Entrance tests demand enormous time from and impose crushing opportunity costs on students quite apart from the huge financial outlays borne by parents. It is difficult to imagine a more wasteful dissipation of the energy and time of the cream of a nation’s youth than that expended in the preparation for entrance tests. It is an arms race of which the prime beneficiaries are the arms manufacturers (coaching classes). A healthy livelihood is also available for arms smugglers and other middlemen (paper leakers).
“Parents or guardians spare nothing (including their life savings) to prepare their children or wards to succeed in these entrance exam.”7 In a country as desperately short of resources to fund public education as ours, it is nothing short of criminal to divert so much money simply on the process of admission.
Of course, it is not only the financial outlay that is wasteful in the extreme. The joyless and blighted lives and never-to-be recovered years of the students themselves are an even higher (if less measurable cost). “Students who attend coaching centres give up everything from socializing with friends and going to movies to enjoying school life that a typical teenager desires to involve in the rigorous training process…. [T]he rigorous and intense training regimen at the coaching centres distances students from the world around them… [and has] a lifelong impact on the lives of students. Moreover, the physical and mental well-being of students at coaching centres has always remained questionable.”8 A study of a famous coaching hub, lists some of the aggravating factors and their consequences: 9
Lack of physical activity
Lack of guidance and psychological counselling services
Division of students into haves and have-nots
Suicides among students
Juvenile delinquency
In sum, the nation and its youth are paying a huge price for a charade that cannot identify those who will perform better or worse in their careers of choice.
Basic fairness
Those who found in their admission to a prestigious college decades ago their route from a humble background to prosperity and fame might justifiably feel that these seemingly merit-based entrance tests are still the fairest way to identify talent. Unfortunately, owing to the arms race described above, that blindness to financial circumstances is a thing of the past. Those without economic wherewithal are genuinely disadvantaged by entrance tests that demand high-pressure and high-cost coaching. “The elite’s enormous investment in its children’s education… represents a new … technology of dynastic succession, truly a ‘revolution in family wealth transmission.’ … Although meritocracy once opened up the elite to outsiders, the meritocratic inheritance now drives a wedge between meritocracy and opportunity.”10 Sandel makes the same point. “Standardized tests… purport to measure merit on its own, so that students from modest backgrounds can demonstrate intellectual promise. In practice, however, [these] scores closely track family income. The richer a student’s family, the higher the score he or she is likely to receive.”11 He goes on to raise an even more fundamental ethical question about talent itself. “Why assume that our talents should determine our destiny, and that we merit or deserve the rewards that flow from them? … [M]y having this or that talent is not my doing but a matter of good luck, and I do not merit or deserve the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck. … If our talents are gifts for which we are indebted – whether to the genetic lottery or to God – then it is a mistake and a conceit to assume we deserve the benefits that flow from them.”12
Not only is the contest no longer fair but it leaves the losers with a sense of inadequacy that impairs their self-image and confidence to succeed elsewhere. “The blaming and negative moral assessments that result for those who do not perform well on standardized tests – even though test performance is strongly influenced by matters of luck and factors connected to opportunities to learn that are well beyond individual control – are not accidental or merely occasional… [T]here is a proliferation of threats to the emotional and physical well-being of students as their test results inexorably transform matters of moral luck in their lives into matters of fact about their life opportunities and their lived experience… Test scores become enduring reified facts about persons regardless of the legitimacy of the meanings attached to those scores.”13
What’s the alternative?
Saved by sortition
Considering the length of what has set the stage, the actual solution is very brief. Start with a nationwide (or state-wise or institute-specific) test that only checks for the requisite literacy, adequate cognitive abilities and sufficient knowledge of the disciplines necessary for understanding the foundational subjects of the prospective course. Every person clearing this test should be eligible to participate in a lottery (a process of sortition) which will determine the actual entrants to that course/institute. “This proposal does not ignore merit altogether; only those qualified are admitted. But it treats merit as a threshold qualification, not an ideal to be maximized… Setting a threshold of qualification and letting chance decide the rest would restore some sanity to the high school years, and relieve, at least to some extent, the soul-killing, resume-stuffing, perfection-seeking experience they have become.” 14
Thinking over the various challenges and constraints of our education system, while I could come up only with sortition as a feasible solution, even I found it somewhat radical. As I researched the topic, however, I was relieved (and chagrined) to find that wiser persons than I had reached similar conclusions. Sixty years ago Robert Wolff wrote: “Either the value of admission to one college rather than another must be eliminated; or admission to college must be made an irrational process on which the student can have no influence… My personal preference is for a process of random admission… The objections are obvious… But before the proposal is rejected out of hand as absurd and impractical, let me urge one consideration in its favor. If I am right that our present educational system stifles the intellectual growth of millions of young men and women, then surely we should be willing to pay a very great price to set them free.” 15
A far more recent defence of managing admissions by lottery comes from Barry Schwartz in 2019. “Admission to highly selective institutions should be done by lottery. Every selective school should establish criteria that students would have to meet to have a high likelihood of being successful. Then, the names of all applicants who meet these criteria would be put into a hat and the winners would be drawn at random.”16 I can go on multiplying testimonials from educationists and academicians but I think the point has been made.
Sortition has a long history. “The use of lot for political purposes in ancient Athens extends from at least the seventh century BCE right up to the end of democracy in 312 BCE and beyond. In Venice the combination of sortition and election lasted from the thirteenth century to the fall of the republic in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The Florentine system was used from 1328 until the fall of the First Republic in 1434.” 17 Diverse thinkers, over the years, who have justified the essential fairness of the process include Machiavelli, 18 Harrington19 and Thomas Paine. 20
Higher educational institutions and professional programs as far afield as Netherlands, Great Britain and a variety of other Western countries have switched to lottery systems for admissions. Admissions lotteries are also used by a large number of charter schools in the US (“schools licensed to operate independent[ly]… on the assumption that increased autonomy will enable them to be more innovative, efficient, and responsive to students’ needs”) 21 with generally positive results.
The purpose behind this historical and geographic digression is to reset our thinking on lotteries. They are not just frivolous gambles for earning windfall gains and undeserved payouts. They have serious application to issues of governance, justice and, of course, admissions.
Objections to change
Objections to sortition could well have been raised by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption: three manacled men who Christian encountered in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’.22 They put their objections in the form of scathing questions.
Question from Simple (credulous public): Will you go to a doctor who entered medical college through a lottery?
Answer: Simple, you are already receiving medical attention from such a doctor. The lower scorers in NEET go on to join private medical colleges and, once they pass out, there is nothing to prevent them from treating the Simples of the world.
Question from Sloth (corporate recruiter): How will companies like ours recruit without the preselection these entrance tests do for us?
Answer: Sloth, would your firm not benefit from tailor-made selection processes that provide talent suited to its specific needs and culture? College entrance tests cannot really predict career success. They yield standardized, pressure-processed individuals from privileged backgrounds, while eliminating 90% of the country’s population from the consideration-set. By relying on them we are neither getting the full benefit of India’s demographic dividend nor starting with a rich enough mix of diversity to build upon later.
Question from Presumption (impractical idealist): Why didn’t you think of increasing premium quality seats for all courses?
Answer: I did, Presumption, I did. While expansion of top-quality education capacity is the ideal long-term-solution, it will take many years. We can’t waste more generations as exam-fodder while waiting for it to happen.
I am sure there can be many more questions. I shall set them aside while I join some soon-to-be carefree young friends in singing:
Imagine there’s no swotting,It isn’t hard to do,Nothing to mug or die forAnd no coaching religion, too;Imagine all the studentsLivin’ happily.YouYou may say I’m a dreamer,But I’m not the only one;I hope many more’ll join usAnd make youth again fun!Notes:
Leo Tolstoy, Twenty Three Tales, White Crow Books, 2010.
Jennifer Medina, Katie Benner and Kate Taylor, Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in U.S. College Entry Fraud, The New York Times, 12 March 2019.
Robert M Kaplan and Dennis P Saccuzzo, Psychological Testing Principles, Applications, and Issues, Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc; 7th edition, 2009.
Robert Paul Wolff, The college as rat-race: Admissions and anxieties, Dissent, 11(1), 13-20, 1964.
Barry Schwartz, Do College Admissions By Lottery, Behavioral Scientist, 4 June 2019
Robert M Kaplan and Dennis P Saccuzzo, Psychological Testing Principles, Applications, and Issues, Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc; 7th edition, 2009.
Gurbinder Kaur, Private Coaching Centres in India: A Document Analysis of JEE-Advanced Preparation Centres on the Lives of Students in Kota, Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education, Faculty of Education, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, 2020.
Gurbinder Kaur, Private Coaching Centres in India: A Document Analysis of JEE-Advanced Preparation Centres on the Lives of Students in Kota, Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education, Faculty of Education, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, 2020.
Patanjali Mishra and Bhupendra Singh, Clash of Competitions: A Study on Coaching Classes of Kota, European Academic Research, September 2017.
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, Penguin, 2020.
Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, Penguin, 2021.
Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, Penguin, 2021.
Ronald David Glass, Left Behind Once Again: What’s Luck Got to Do with Current Education Policies and Practices?, Philosophy of Education Archive, 354-363, 2006.
Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, Penguin, 2021.
Robert Paul Wolff, The college as rat-race: Admissions and anxieties, Dissent, 11(1), 13-20, 1964.
Barry Schwartz, Do College Admissions By Lottery, Behavioral Scientist, 4 June 2019.
Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A study of the random selection of citizens for public office, Imprint Academic, 2009.
Niccolo Machiavelli, trans Allan Gilbert, Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence, Machiavelli – the chief works and others, Volume One, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989.
Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A study of the random selection of citizens for public office, Imprint Academic, 2009.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Jonathan R Dolle and Anne Newman, Luck of the Draw? On the Fairness of Charter School Admissions Policies, Paper presented at the 2008 American Educational Research Association annual meeting and the 2008 meeting of the California Association of Philosophy of Education.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Derby and Miller, 1853.