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Entrance Exams and Their Flaws

There are many undeniable flaws in the entrance exam system  such as the problem of grade inflation, the impossibly high cutoffs for admission to the good colleges, the conflicting and impossible schedules of entrance examinations and so on. What is lost in the noise, however, is an understanding of what purpose it is that examinations should serve, what are their inherent limits and what those limits mean for education policy. To understand the problem with public examinations we need to understand the different objectives they serve and how they interact and conflict with each other.

Broadly speaking examinations are used with three different objectives. The first is a threshold objective, which seeks to describe the level of attainment of any student, and most importantly this objective seeks to identify those who meet the desired minimum level of attainment at this level of education. The second objective is for higher level institutions (i.e. colleges and universities) that wish to select from the students who have met the minimum level of attainment. This selection is constrained by the intake capacity of the institution.

Thus, Delhi University or the IITs will seek to admit the best from amongst those eligible to seek admission. They, therefore, are interested in a ranking of students. Finally, we have the makers and researchers of education policy who seek to evaluate the overall education system by using the performance in these exams as the basis to study how well the system has delivered. Grade inflation occurs in large part because lower level institutions (i.e. schools) seek to privilege their own students in the entry competition and simultaneously present an attractive performance picture for themselves.

Grade inflation presents a peculiar challenge for the higher institution because it finds its selection being squeezed in an ever narrower band. The media is routinely full of stories when elite Delhi colleges closed their first lists at 100 per cent marks. This dilemma of selection, in turn, forces many higher level institutions to device their own entrance tests. The growth in specialized entrance tests then fuels the growth of a service industry to coach students to prepare solely for entrance tests. This then leads to another perverse cycle of incentives where students focus on the coaching institution, comforted in large part that they will meet the minimum threshold due to grade inflation.

(Analysis Article)
-The Hindu
CRESI

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