Exam Marks

As pupils sweat over their examination papers in Britain they might like to offer a silent prayer of thanks that they do not live in India. Competition for one university has grown so fierce that it has set 100 per cent as the acceptable pass mark for school-leavers taking the Indian equivalent of A levels.

Depending on the examinations that they take, pupils either receive an aggregate percentage mark or, for subjects such as engineering, an individual rank. For those wanting to study for a BA at the Shri Ram College of Commerce at Delhi University, nothing short of perfection will do. P. C. Jain, the principal, said: “We get the best students from across the country.”

The arrival of the 100 per cent cut-off has prompted renewed soul searching over the pressures on children of a system of pitiless grading and relentless competition. The Education Minister called it irrational and another senior Indian politician said that it was terrifying.

As the number of people able to afford private coaching for their children increases by tens of millions each year, it is inevitable that the crush outside the gates of the handful of trusted and established institutions will grow, said Aditya Berlia, prochancellor at Apeejay, another prestigious Indian college.

He said that the system that taught children only to “crack exams” left many “socially disabled”. “All they have done for years is school, crammer, home. They may have got brilliant marks but we have to teach them how to solve a problem and they are terribly, terribly awkward,” he said.

Previous efforts to reform India’s grades-driven system have failed in a country where the ideal of meritocracy is more preached than practised.

“There’s this notion that somehow ranking students in this way is transparent. Parents are suspicious if other factors are taken into account,” Mr Berlia, who admitted that institutions found it convenient, said.

Because so much is invested in a single test, examination papers arrive in armoured cars and rumours of foul play spark riots. Although commerce is one of the most sought-after degree subjects, nowhere is competition fiercer than in engineering. The IITJEE examination has spawned an entire city of crammers. Pupils in their mid-teens, from across India, spend two years in Kota, Rajasthan, preparing for it. What little time they have left over is spent in “school coaching” to keep up with a minimum of nonengineering studies — or sleeping in one of 600 dormitories in the city. Of the 450,000 that sit it each year the most elite institutions, such as IIT Kanpur, select only those with a rank higher than 500. Admission, however, is a ticket to career success. Professor Sanjay Srivastava, writing about Kota recently, said that it was India’s lowermiddle class that took the greatest risks in sending their children to the crammers, often staking the whole family’s savings on fees. “For many small-town people in India a merciless system of highly selective examinations is one of the key avenues of social mobility,” the sociologist wrote.

For pupils such as Ashima Sharma there is only the bitterness of not quite making the grade for Shri Ram College of Commerce. “I got an aggregate of 98 per cent which everyone told me was a good percentage to get into any college,” she said mournfully.