This shit is so crazy. A bit of an old news but I don't know if people outside of India caught wind of this.
The National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under India’s Ministry of Education that is responsible for holding the nationwide examinations, is at the centre of these controversies over the integrity of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), a national exam for medical aspirants held last month.
There are two NEET exams, one for undergrad and one for postgrad. The former was held but the results have been scrapped. The latter has been postponed. The postponement was announced the night before the exam.
The scale of foul play is something that I have not been able to wrap my head around mostly because I have not read the news articles about this recently. There were reports of some participants getting marks that were mathematically impossible and shit like that.
"Autonomous bodies" have become an extension of the ruling party. For example, BJP uses the Election Commision to arrest opposition leaders and freeze the funds of opposition parties. I wouldn't be surprised if the NTA was chock full of deadbeat BJP lackeys. Truly a terrible time to be an Indian right now.
This is what entrance exams were made to do by design. This isn’t a bug.
They are entirely designed to lock out students who can’t afford to pay the absurd costs of test prep, while pushing through those students who’s parents could afford tutors that cost severs thousand dollars a month.
A prime example is the LSAT exam in the US for law school.
The exam is graded on a scale of 120-180, with a score above 175 being virtually unheard of due to the difficulty of the exam. Before, a good performance in undergrad combined with a score of at least 150-160 could guarantee you a spot in an top law school. However nowadays, scores have entered a horrific cycle of inflation that to get into any middling or top law school, a score in the high 170s is required, which is absurd. Anything below that is essentially a failure. A score that only 15-20 years ago would be the mark of a savant, has been relegated to only those who have the money to pay for test prep, and the privilege of the luxury of stress free time to study.
Of course; this works to the advantage of the top law schools as they get to isolate the wealthiest for admission, but how many have been locked out of a good law education due to their life circumstances?
Further, what kind of lawyers will those wealthy students become? Statistically they will become corporate “big law” lawyers with extremely high salaries. Leading to mass shortages in public defenders, workers rights workers, and civil rights lawyers. Essentially those who protect the poorest and most oppressed members of society, while simultaneously threatening capital.
I agree with you in essence but there are a lot of differences between USA and India in this context. Prep and tuition fees are inhibiting for most of the potential aspirants but they are much lower than in the US. The result is that way way more people are able to prepare for and take these entrance exams. In the US on the other hand, you first need an ultra expensive undergrad degree, then medical school applications and interviews and so forth. In India, massive tutoring companies are the beneficiaries. Allen Career Institute for example posted a total revenue of about INR 20,000,000,000 last year and there are four or five other companies like this along with the god knows many small businesses and individuals in this sector. All this for preparing high school students for entrance exams. There is a city called Kota in Rajasthan where:
(Hostels in Kota are outfitted with special ceiling fans designed to prevent suicide by hanging.)
Those who are very wealthy and want to skip this process do one of two things. They either study abroad. Or study in private colleges where admissions can be bought but they are usually not considered prestigious, not that it matters to those already with a lot of wealth. There is little advantage that an extremely wealthy aspirant has in these exams compared to someone who is moderately wealthy or even just upper middle class.
These exams are rather meant as a bottleneck between an extremely large number of aspirants and an extremely low number of vacancies in higher education. The exams are very difficult to present an illusion of meritocracy but the "competitiveness" is a foil for a weak and wanting education system.