Massive Chaos in the First Day of CUET, UGC Must Declare Retest Provision!
Yesterday was the first day of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) and we witnessed massive chaos across the country. Many students were not able to give exams due to the last minute change of examination centres by the apathetic administration. And shockingly, M Jagadesh Kumar, the UGC Chairperson, has now declared that there is not going to be any retest for those candidates! So, many of them are going to lose one year just because of administrative callousness. Further, students came to know the examination date only 4 – 5 days before the exam, and some students will give exam on 5 subjects they have chosen on the same day! Besides these issues, more dangerously, CUET is going to destroy the education system of the country. Here we are reproducing an edited version of IIT Bombay Professor Anurag Mehra’s very important write up on CUET, published on The Scroll on July 11, 2022.
How the CUET will turn India’s schools into giant coaching factories
The chickens are coming home to roost quite fast. The Central University Entrance Test, or CUET – to be used as a single window for admission to undergraduate programmes – will kill the school system quicker than thought of.
First, that the CUET “has hammered the last nail into the coffin of board examinations by making them of no relevance at all”. Second, that there will be pressure to get rid of long-form learning and examinations, and focus only on multiple choice-type questions that the CUET proposes to use.
Lastly, that the CUET is a humongous business opportunity for the coaching industry, which will sink its teeth into even more parts of the school education that were hitherto untouched by it. This will lead to the usual inequity that poorer students face when accessing coaching classes.
With respect to each and every entrance examination – shows that coaching classes coach for any and everything. A Financial Express report now says that, “according to the ed-tech players, CUET seems to become one of the greatest markets in the educational service providing sectors”.
A simple internet search for “CUET coaching” shows how much online and offline coaching is already available, ranging from small centres to big players such as Aakash and Unacademy.
Unsurprisingly, a Delhi University-affiliated college, Ramanaujan College, even set up a coaching class for CUET. It was unmindful of the conflict of interest since the marks of the examination for which it is coaching students will be used for admission into their own college. The college retracted when faced with a severe backlash. Ostensibly, the college wanted to provide affordable coaching – Rs 12,000 for the course – compared to private players.
The numerous problems range from the fact that these entrance examinations put students from rural areas at a disadvantage and thus such groups find low representation in the admitted cohorts. Also, additional costs will prove to be detrimental for low-income families who might be forced to opt out of the admission process altogether. This also hurts girls students because of the traditional reluctance of many parents to educate daughters in comparison to sons. So much for inclusivity.
The CUET has also again brought into focus the “dummy school”. Such a school has been defined accurately by the coaching classes themselves: “Dummy schools, also known as Non-Attending Schools is a school where students are admitted to the same way as regular schools but they don’t have to attend regular school classes so that they can focus more on their JEE/NEET exam preparation.”
What has been happening so far to JEE and NEET aspirants is now happening, at a larger scale, for CUET aspirants as well. The system is being hollowed out from the inside, as more and more schools fall into some kind of marriage with coaching classes.
It is also becoming increasingly evident that market forces will now dictate how schools evolve to tackle the CUET. Parents are openly suggesting that practicals and internal assessments which use written examinations in schools are useless because they do not help in cracking the CUET, which is based on multiple choice questions. Therefore, these should be removed. This logic recommends that schools should evolve into gigantic, CUET coaching factories themselves.
Instead of being counted as the centres for a proper, holistic education, schools will be transformed into the very beast they were supposed to slay. This is the beginning of the end of basic communication – reading, writing – broad analytical skills and engagement with complex concepts.
We do not have to remain in the CUET prison. It is never too late to attack the root of the problem – school education and board examinations require reform, not the admission system. Cosmetic tinkering, an abundance of hype about “historic reforms” and an inability to face ground realities will only defer the attempts to cure the disease to after it has become much worse.
