It’s admissions week! When 100% becomes a requirement for admission and when it’s clear that there are enough students getting 100% to make it a viable cut-off for a university to be full, there is something wrong with the measuring device (the test) itself.
The tragedy for our children is that in a world where being one in a million means that there are 1300 others just like you, a single number can represent failure. With a cut-off of 100%, a score of 98% has the same outcome as 88% or 78% (which is what some current professors at IIT Delhi were able to get in on in their day). The reality is that it is not the failure of our children, but the system used to assess them and gain entry to college that we are seeing here; the system is 100% no longer fit for purpose.
The Context: The Fossilised System
Some examination boards closed down their research and development departments years ago and have offered the same miserable assessment of rote learned content ever since. With no regular critical reflection on the relevance or value of what was being offered, other than the outcome on a percentage scale, no progress in assessing learning has been made as the world has moved on around them. Examination boards in India have also been allowed to behave as ministries of education, requiring schools to do things with their organisation, resources, infrastructure and staff that no assessment board they choose has any business mandating.
If any of the major Indian assessment boards were to change what they offered their results would still be measured against the same scale as every other board. If their results went down schools would look at an alternative board. For years in the UK, schools have been shopping around for the assessment board that would be most favourable to their students. In some schools this has meant working with four or five different boards, managing their concurrent examination timetables and teachers frequently having to learn a new syllabus as changes in board are made. Of course, this is within a system that reports results as letter grades (A*, A, B, C etc.) rather than as a percentage, so the comparison of the second decimal place doesn’t happen and students who are similarly able or outstanding are seen together.
Because the Indian board exams have changed so little and the answers are facsimiles of the textbooks (content over understanding and skill) there is a perfect market for coaching. This market is fed by the belief that it is required and, as a result, students often work at a very low capacity in school, prioritising their ECAs, because they know that they will be spending the holidays before the pre boards and final board exams with their tutors or at a coaching centre. The tutors and coaches become more important in their learning and estimation than the teachers who may have been working with them for years (and sometimes may even be those teachers).
Alternatives that assess more than rote learning: where are we today?
When the NEP 2020 talks about reforming the existing system of Board and entrance examinations to eliminate the need for undertaking coaching classes, there is much work to be done in creating the boundaries and framework within which assessment boards work. Eliminating the need for coaching classes is really the work of schools to deliver a better alternative, although the existing system of board and entrance examinations creates the environment in which coaching classes can thrive.
The educational economics of population size and the number of reputable colleges and universities is the key driver of 100% cut-offs; there are so many aspirational and able students-in-waiting to go to the best domestic universities. The shortage of supply means that it is easier to get into Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge than it is to get into LSR or St. Stephen’s. This comparison, however, does not mean that the quality of teaching and learning or the programme design should be compared; it cannot, and this is laid bare each year in the global university ratings and rankings. The supply situation has been improved by the opening of more innovative university colleges like Ashoka, OP Jindal, Thapar and BML Munjal and will also benefit from the collaborations with foreign universities outlined in the Internationalization section of the NEP 2020.
The new domestic universities have been pushing boundaries in programme design, teaching and learning for some time and have been turning out graduates who are better equipped and can add more value to a team in the marketplace than some graduates from more established universities who can ‘crack’ admissions tests, but couldn’t have an original idea if their future depended on it. Of course, the top students at the top universities getting through the current admissions lottery will come top anywhere; they are brilliant, but it is not their universities or their schools that made them so.
Some of the country’s older institutions that have historically been, and consider themselves to be, prestigious, are in danger of being out innovated and out classed by these relative newcomers to the field. The more recently created programmes and courses are also being delivered by younger professors and lecturers with both international and more recent work experience. They are working harder to attract students rather than letting them flow in, which means they are thinking about the needs of those students. For many young adults, away from home for the first time, this can make the difference between success and failure at college where dropout rates in the first year should be reported alongside cut-offs and toppers; universities have more responsibility for the former than the latter.
One of the advantages for the international assessment boards in India is that their programmes are far more focused on developing understanding, skill development and collaboration than what is available domestically. Their results, however, cannot be compared to the national boards. The IBO has been dealt a blow in India, as they have in other countries including Germany, that the conversion of their highest scores are not accurately pegged against the national percentage scale. This is partly down to a lack of understanding of just what 43 IB points means and, I’m sure, partly politically motivated to inflate the credibility of the percentage scale. There is a world of difference in the capacity, knowledge and understanding of IB and ISC students, and while there are exceptional students choosing both programmes there is no doubt in my mind that an IB student with 36 points is a better prospect for a university than an ISC student with 95%, never mind the 89% that their IB points would be converted to.
I worry that the uncertainty in the marking of domestic papers is greater than the accuracy claimed by the examination boards. The difference between a student getting 97.8%, 98.7% and 100% is of no consequence when a student who scored 83% can get an additional 5% from a remark. Add to this the practice of moderation that is carried out by the boards and the credibility of the result being used to distinguish one candidate from the next no longer exists. Moderation should be the practice of checking the way in which marking criteria have been applied by examiners and adjusting to remedy any inconsistencies, not a global factor by which everyone’s marks are inflated in any given year to adjust for some chosen factor. With more uncertainty than accuracy it seems imperative for colleges to meet and interview more than just the toppers to decide who they want to take and who is going to add value to their institutions. Not doing so seems like a missed opportunity and, in the long run, an existential threat that will reduce diversity and maintain a myopic view of what good students look like.
As more private and ‘public’ schools in India choose international assessments for their brand conscious parents looking to send their children overseas to university, escaping the dreadful cut-offs and awkward conversations, the domestic boards will have to differentiate themselves and play catch up; with no research and development departments to guide them they are already starting from the behind.
Bringing about Change: Some experiments
When we looked at the results of earlier admissions tests for The Doon School in 2016, it was clear that there was nothing discerning about the tests being used. If so many were are able to get over 90% in a test then how does one tell the interesting students from those who have been coached and mugged up? By creating new tests for literacy, mathematics and reasoning, we were able to distribute the results over a much wider range and look for understanding and visible thinking rather than recall and arbitrary (meaningless) general knowledge.
Creating the tests ourselves allowed us to make sure that no one in the market place had seen such a test before (we also changed elements of the tests each year) and we made sure that every parent registering their child knew this; coaching wouldn’t help. Of course, there are always parents who are willing to be parted from their money and there are always charlatans who will try and make a living from these people.
We also asked ourselves what we were looking for in our students, what the strengths were that they would need to thrive in school and what we hoped they would be able to contribute when living and working with others. Rather than getting more of the same type of student we wanted to get more of a different kind of student to develop a more diverse, emotionally rich and healthy school. If we knew what we wanted then we needed to be assessing for it in the admissions process. This is why we introduced a social and emotional component to the reasoning paper that allowed us to better identify students with empathy, self awareness and a moral compass that would stand up to some of the challenges presented by the school’s context.
By interviewing the top half of the candidates for the places available we made sure that we met everyone who had the capacity to add value to their peer group and the school; something that India’s new universities make sure they do as well as many of the world’s best colleges. Holding a group discussion rather than an individual interview allowed us to see the candidates as they were likely to be in the school setting; interacting with their peers. Short individual interviews are very unreliable, not to mention incredibly tedious, but seeing candidates trying to work collaboratively, listen to each other and build ideas and solutions together really shows who you must make an offer to and, just as importantly, who you must not. What we learned from follow up with students was that coached students performed worse in these discussions; they are unable to remember who they are, they could not be authentic.
Of course parents are only trying to do their best for their child by finding them a coach, but a coach cannot make up for the job that parents could (or should) have been doing for more than 10 years. Coaching, as it turns out, would be far more useful for parents than their children and would add value if it came at the beginning of their work rather than six months before a school or university admissions test.
On a school-by-school basis these sorts of changes are possible, but the challenge with making any changes to a system from within is that it’s so difficult to imagine any alternative when the only thing you know or have seen is the landscape that surrounds you. Almost everyone working in the current system is a product of the system, and at the apex is an admission test to the various Civil Services of Government that takes place under the same conditions with all of the self-serving myths and folklore that surround it.
The Way Forward; thank you to 2020
Covid-19 and the lockdowns of 2020 have shown us many things about how we were living and working and what is possible to do remotely. Universities and schools have responded by moving their courses online and teachers have upskilled themselves faster than at any time before to make use of collaborative learning and video conferencing applications. International assessment boards used teachers’ assessment of students’ work, which they have always collected, rather than final examinations and universities used time bound, open book, online exams to assess their students. These approaches will all be refined over this academic year and many of them will work for admissions as well as they do for evaluating learning.
We will see over the next two years what the impact will be in universities of G12 examinations the world over being cancelled and students being admitted based on school evaluations. The new universities coming up will take the opportunity to do things differently for admissions, teaching and assessment, allowing students to utilise the strengths that they have developed this year. More students will want to stay and study in India as the choice widens and more institutions differentiate themselves by offering better support services to their students and deliver quality teaching and learning with a new generation of lecturers and international collaborators, rather than resting on their laurels. Fewer people will be interested in the established names unless they are able to demonstrate that they offer something fit for tomorrow; this is as true for India’s legacy boarding schools as it is for DU’s colleges.
My advice to anyone weighing up the choice of a new liberal arts university like Ashoka against Hindu College or St. Stephen’s is to really look for the courses that you know you want to study, and know why you want to study them. If you don’t know what you want to study then go for a liberal arts programme every time. Success in life is not about going to the right school or college, it’s about knowing yourself and finding your fit so that you will thrive. I have worked with thousands of students over the years and know that the least happy, least successful were all doing things that were chosen for them, that they thought they ought to do or that they thought would look good on a CV. A few carefully directed conversations and reflections with the right mentor can help students and parents enormously, but too many conversations with everyone and their astrologer can do the opposite. Be careful who you talk to and then be happy with your plan, remember that it is your plan and it doesn’t need to fit other people’s ideas of what your plan should be. The purpose of an education is to teach people how to think, not what to think and you need to find a programme and a community that will allow you to become the person you are waiting to be, not the person others are trying to impose on you.
We are on the verge of a sea change in the Indian Educational Landscape, one that has been brewing for some time and which the best elements of the NEP 2020 will contribute to if implemented well. MR Ed Partners is able to provide bespoke services for schools and consultations to families to help them navigate these changes and add value.
