I study under two curricula simultaneously, each based on entirely different educational philosophies—not by choice, but by geography. My school follows the International Baccalaureate, and the surrounding city is deep in NEET preparation season. The IB Programme requires students to be thoughtful and justify their thinking through a process of engaging with ideas, developing arguments, and being able to make assumptions and present written work which does not necessarily have a clear answer. The other asks them to eliminate three wrong choices in under ninety seconds.
This is not another piece about exam stress or coaching culture, important as those topics are. This article addresses something much less visible and more systemic in nature. India’s examination architecture of JEE, NEET and CUET is not “broken”; it operates exactly as intended. That, precisely, is the problem.
The evaluations that are used to determine how well someone can operate under conditions of limited resources with a set syllabus, timetable, format and a sole answer for each question have been shown, through empirical evidence, to measure these types of skills exceptionally well—discipline, the recognition of patterns and the ability to handle multiple tasks when there is little time available. These skills are truly cognitive skill sets.
However, they are the strengths of an optimiser, not an inventor. The work of Carol Dweck on mindsets clearly shows that learners who have a fixed mindset view performance as a measure of their value, whereas learners who have a growth mindset view poor performance as data points. The Indian examination system has been systematically applied over many years throughout India to produce these types of students, creating an industrial system that is maximising output rather than innovating.
This is where it becomes counterintuitive.
Those who clear JEE Advanced and go on to IITs are the system’s greatest successes. They are also among many celebrated founders and CEOs within Silicon Valley—Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla, and a long list behind them. This notion is frequently cited as evidence that the current system in India works for its citizens. However, this is actually evidence of the opposite; all of these people have created life-changing companies OUTSIDE of India, in America.
What the examination gauntlet produces, it turns out, is people extraordinarily capable of succeeding after escaping the system that made them. The traits that help you survive Kota—extreme risk-aversion, error-elimination, performance under pressure—are poor inputs for building a startup, running an experiment that might fail, or asking a question the textbook does not contain.
India ranks 39th out of 100 countries on the Global Innovation Index. The gap between innovative output and human capital is not solely due to the issue of ‘Brain Drain’. The successful students who leave have succeeded in our system of education and are the exceptions to the norm. The more pressing question is, what happened to the vast creative middle—the ones who missed the cutoff, internalised that result as a verdict on their intelligence, and quietly stopped taking intellectual risks. This very large group of students is, by definition, the majority of students.
The National Education Policy 2020 provides for reform of our education system—less rote learning, more holistic methods of assessment, and more flexibility across disciplines. Though the wording of the NEP supports this reform, the actual implementation of this reform still uses the old paradigm. As long as a single examination at age seventeen is the primary mechanism by which India sorts its young people into futures, the policy language is decoration. It is not possible to produce a growth-minded generation when we utilise a fixed-minded method for selecting students.
India’s stated ambition is Viksit Bharat by 2047—a developed nation at the centenary of independence. The students who will build this nation are currently in school learning, above all else, that a wrong answer is a disaster, that ambiguity is failure, and that the aim is to get rid of mistakes, rather than generate ideas. We have raised a population fearful of making mistakes. Then we wonder why they do not build.
The ability to take risks is a learned skill. Like any other skill, if you never use it, it will eventually die (due to the cumulative impact of lack of practice!) The compounded cost of this, across a billion people and multiple generations, is far from a small number.
Exams are NOT broken. They work flawlessly—which is why they need to change!
Jayaditya Kumar is a student of Oberoi International School, Mumbai . Views are personal.
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