It is said that during a gold rush, the biggest fortunes are made not by the gold-diggers, but by the shovel and spade suppliers. Now take the business of competitive entrance exams for professional courses, CAT, JEE, and PMT, for example.
Here, the gold-diggers are the students, of whom only one in a few hundred is likely to hit pay dirt and gain access into an IIT, an IIM or the AIIMS. The suppliers though, institutes like Career Forum, Career Launcher, IMS, Brilliant Tutorials and TIME, that are tutoring the gold diggers, are raking it in and fast shedding the cottage industry-like tag of ‘coaching classes’.
These businesses are no longer the one-man-shows set up by a local college professor trying to augment his/her income, are now professionally run firms with a national presence. The industry as a whole is witnessing a growth of well over 30%, and the biggest of these firms now clock in excess of a hundred crore in revenues.
Just recently the results of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2020 came out and two students topped the exam. Out of which one student namely Soyeb Aftab has been claimed by numerous coaching institutes as if they have provided coaching to him. This is the height of unethical behavior on the part of these coaching institutes and they should allow the credit to go to the rightful institute as it takes a lot of effort to produce a topper.
In cases where the candidates cannot be shortlisted using the scores obtained in the examination, candidates are further shortlisted taking into consideration the number of answers that are incorrect, following which they are then shortlisted depending on their age.
Since such a policy existed beforehand, as officials say it did, one cannot contest that the decision to place Singh second was unprecedentedly baseless. It is, however, largely arbitrary and deserves to be questioned. Should competitive exams such as NEET be judged basis any criteria other than merit? Why should age be a consideration for the top spot on an exam meant to test the knowledge and skill of students?
Age is neither an achievement nor is it a skill acquired through hard work. It is purely accidental. Some even argue that oftentimes after people transition into adulthood (or reach a checkpoint in life considered truly adult, which is usually post-schooling), age isn’t a barometer anymore for their degree of intelligence or knowledge. A younger individual can be as sharp, perhaps even sharper, than someone older to them age-wise. So is declaring an exam topper with an absurd age reasoning really valid?
Alternatively, for argument’s sake, let’s take into account the general perception that an older person has more skill than someone younger to them. In such a scenario, if the younger candidate performs at par with the one understood to be “better” because he is older, shouldn’t the younger one be awarded the winning position? For her exemplary knowledge?
something as systematic and transient as marks and ranks can only take a person so far along with their career goals. What’s primary is the faith you have within yourself to actualise your dreams. But it would be too righteous for anyone to say that in a world like ours, that is unfortunately paced to the tunes of numbers and stats, marks don’t matter. As sorry as that sounds, they do. Which means they have high chances of having an effect on the student psyche. Especially during a pandemic year.
No one is to say which of the two outlooks Akanksha has adopted upon achieving a second rank on an exam that she prepared relentlessly for, and aced as best as the candidate sitting atop the NEET list.
For its forthcoming years, the NTA would be better off devising a policy that considers another measure of deciding achievers, that is strictly restricted to the exam sheet. Or better yet, and easier – why not jointly give two tied candidates the top slot together?
In the aftermath of the result, several coaching institutes have taken out advertisements with Soyeb as the face of the ad, implying that he took coaching from their institute. This includes coaching institutes like Aakash DNP, Gravity, Etoosininda, Pathfinder, and Sri Chaitanya Leadership.
But where did 18-year-old Soyeb really take coaching? In an interview, he said that he was studying at Allen Career Institute. He added that he put the time during the pandemic when he was confined to his home to study well.
Son to a businessman and a homemaker, Soyeb is the first in his family to pursue his dream career in medical sciences.
According to a few reports though, Soyeb was a classroom student of Allen but had also enrolled into a distance course, from Aakash and Sri Chaitanya institutes. Though it is unclear what kind of distance courses and whether it contributed to his scores, these two institutes have claimed credit. Many others, of course, have claimed that he was their student without any apparent contribution.
Furthermore, this is not the first time that this happened. Back in 2017 too, newspapers had carried ads of coaching institutes where nine of the toppers of the AIIMS entrance featured in ads of two coaching institutes. Two of these toppers pursued classroom coaching at both institutes, according to the latter’s claims. Similar observations were made in the context of the JEE Advanced exam results, where three coaching institutes advertised four of the top 20 toppers as their students.
This money-making business needs some serious reforms so as not to mislead the sheep into joining their institutes based on false statements and promises. The gold diggers are fooled into joining many such classes thinking that the classes are the road to success. The policymakers need to curb these malpractices in the interests of the gullible parents and students.
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