You thought only the best make it to the top higher education institutes of India, the IIM's and IIT's, but that is only half true, which was revealed after a RTI query laid bare the staggering number of dropouts due to academic inexcellence.
69 students dropped out of IIM-Calcutta in the past 2 years, and 286 students since 1995, and this is just one IIM, the state is similar in others as well and these figures are increasing every year.
Professor of finance and control at IIM-C Asish K Bhattacharyya attributed this to "poor academic performance".
2 IIM's though have shown remarkably low dropout rate, IIM-Ahmadabad attributes this to their mentor program, where a second year student has to mentor a fresher and also the special evening classes for the weaker students. While at IIM-Bangalore the reason is entirely different, a few years back some professors at the institute were pulled up for “bias” against weaker students, and since then all students have been passing the courses irrespective of academic performance.
This is not just a coincident of some sorts, but the result of an increasing trend among the students fueled by the corporate minds, that of joining “coaching centers” and tuitions for “preparing” for competitive examinations like CAT and JEE. Its not just me, "I am looking for students with raw intelligence and not those with a mind prepared by coaching class tutors. The coaching classes only help students in mastering (question paper) pattern recognizing skills. With this, you cannot get students with raw intelligence," said IIT-Madras director, M S Ananth.
Students bunk the school classes and go for coaching as they consider the time spent in school to be a waste of time, leaving behind social, mental and emotional development along with other things and the direct result of this is that they are missing out on the more important values of life and missing the actual goal of human life, to achieve happiness. But the point which concerns this article most is that they are learning to solve questions instead of learning the subject. As Mr. Ananth said the students are learning the tricks to identify and solve the questions instead of acquiring the required skills to master the subject and raw talent is not always able to compete with the ones who have spent 2 years of their life entirely in learning how to “crack” the exam. These coaching institutes have left the purpose of these competitive examinations useless.
One of the more serious implications of this trend is that students who deserve to be in the top institutes are left out due to the “well prepared” students churned out by coaching centers. And the students who just passed due to their cramming skills instead of understanding of the subject face problems, as till then they were spoon-fed things, but once in the institute they have to apply their own brain for tasks entirely different from what they used it for the past 2 years, the smarter ones manage this task change, but the weaker ones have to drop out, and the seats which could have gone to more deserving candidates are left out empty.
We can hardy do anything about this coaching menace, what can be done is a change in the way students are selected for the universities like IIT and IIM, a more direct approach, where along with academic merit the student’s other aspects are analyzed on the patterns followed by most of the foreign universities, where no common exam decides if a student can study at a university but the university personally gets applications and studies them to get a whole picture of the person to decide if he/she is the match for the university.
