Our Take on Engineering Entrance Examinations

Cut back around 30 years to the 1980’s when a school-kid ran back from school, splashing a few puddles of water, gulped down a glass of tea, ran out into the sun and rain to enjoy a hard-fought game of cricket, got into a couple of fights on the way back, whistled at the opposite sex if you’re a guy, got whistled at if you’re a girl and thoroughly enjoyed being your age.

Now to the present day when kids in standard 6 have to rush back from school to their target-IIT courses (imagine 6^th standard children being seriously told the uses of sine-cosine integration)after which they’l have 2 hours of mind-numbingly boring physics tuition by a spectacled guy who thinks that he invented physics in the first place.

Then some idiot guy on a TV channel will encourage weekend classes at some institute to which all the kids would be sent to, on the assumption that all great engineers and inventors in the world like Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison became great by taking coaching at TIME or MATH-IIT. All of which is to presumably get an engineering degree (whether you’re suited to be an engineer or a cook or a jihadist terrorist, in India, first you have to take an engineering degree).

So after 6 years of experiencing twice the workload of an outspoken Jew in a Nazi camp, the kid finally sees Devil himself looming up before him- the Entrance Exam! Half the world’s rainforests are cut to provide enough paper for 10 lakh kids to pit their wits against each other.

 IIt entrance tests are changed up every year to prevent short –cuts from being discovered. One year there’s multiple choice. Next year they put true or false. The year after that, they brought a 10 option bonanza to choose the right answers and make things as complicated as possible. Soon they’ll add tasks to be done followed by a vote-out with a few bikes thrown around the exam hall.

A friend of this blog-writer has suggested that the Kerala state entrance has given added priority to high school marks presumably to even out the sex ratio in engineering courses. Soon like the badminton federation of India and FIFA’s new rules on woman players, engineering females will have mandatory skirts and all to make the whole thing more glamorous.

 And after 6 hours of soul-splitting torture, the exam comes to an end. Then it is but a short wait to the All India, followed by State exams followed by a thousand other sources of engineering nonsense.

 

Just when peace of mind looks to be around the corner, the results are anounced with all the impact of a coconut on a bald head. The joy of successful parents would suggest they were able to bring down Osama single-handedly and the despairing sorrow of parents who cudn't bring up Einsteins suggest the end of the world as we know it. 
Then it is time for parents to visit their relatives to show them their bespectacled knock-kneed skeleton of a son who huffed and puffed to get to that holy engineering seat. The relatives will then reluctantly congratulate the skeleton while explaining that their kid couldn’t get through because ‘the test had out-of-syllabus questions’, ‘it was raining that day and he got distracted’ or the most ironic of the lot ‘engineering isn’t worth all this hype’. Both sets of parents will exchange nervous laughs and then relapse to awkward silence.

Times when kids smaller than ripe watermelons are made to slave like burdened donkeys. Times when a game of cricket followed by a cold lime juice in summer is a luxury. There are some things more important than 10 percent GDP growth rates J