There was a time when a national examination served a clear and limited purpose in India: to find a few thousand officers, soldiers and engineers, and to do it fairly across a vast subcontinent. That restraint is gone. We have taken the logic of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and stretched it across every discipline, every college and every career. A device designed for the few now governs the many. And the country is paying the price for this overreach.
The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test (UGC NET) and other examinations now test lakhs of candidates across disciplines ranging from oncology to organic chemistry and from history to Punjabi literature, all funnelled through the same multiple-choice format. Understandably, this method is designed for uniformity, when in fact it is being used to identify talent, reasoning ability and critical thinking. This precisely is what uniform testing misses out.
Let departments decide
The alternative is simple. Let institutions choose. No national agency can tell what a good student of literature or physics is made of better than the department that will admit her. Departmental examinations indeed, restore judgment to faculty, and freedom to students to apply where their aptitude lies, not where a single all-India rank deposits them. This is not nostalgia. It is the norm in the very systems in the West that we hold up as models.
Professorial appointments were once based on discussions with people who knew the work. It was an examination of judgment through intellectual interchange, not of facts. Teachers, who were superb, often went beyond the syllabus and were always ready for a dialogue. None had sat the NET. Today, there are many students with far more talent than the test rewards. They fail not because they cannot think, but because the test does not ask them to. It merely asks them to master a technique. We have, in the name of standardisation, built a mechanism that rejects exactly what it claims to examine.
No education body appears to have ever conducted the historical comparison that would make this argument undeniable rather than anecdotal. I would wager what such a survey would find, having watched the change from the inside for decades. The quality of discussion in a classroom, the depth of a student’s reading, the willingness of a teacher to be genuinely questioned rather than merely quoted, has thinned considerably. What has replaced it is a generation arriving through memorisation-heavy, choice-based testing, showing little of the wide, unstructured reading that used to be simply assumed of anyone entering a classroom. The examination has indeed changed what the classroom was meant to be.
The numbers game
The same malady runs through the procedures of recruitment. Selection committees increasingly lean on publication counts and research scores. Minimum publication requirements attached to promotions and appointments have created a market for papers rather than a market for ideas. Journals of no discernible academic standing exist largely to accept whatever applicants must publish to meet prescribed research-score requirements by a given deadline. The University Grants Commission’s 2018 Regulations discontinued the earlier API-based Performance Based Appraisal System (PBAS) and introduced a revised assessment framework incorporating research scores. Yet, the underlying problem persists. Academic achievement is still too often reduced to what can be counted.
The same arithmetic has hollowed out the PhD itself — this is being said based on direct observation rather than hearsay. When a candidate’s doctorate is weighed for a teaching post, 30 marks are commonly set aside for it in the selection matrix. This is a substantial share of the total. Yet, almost none of that weight indicates the quality of the mind behind the thesis, the rigour of the argument, or the calibre of the papers the candidate drew from it. Getting the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is no evidence of scholarly merit. So-called authenticated journals publish across seven or eight disciplines under a single title, a “Journal of International Studies” that will print history, management, literature, and law in the same issue, with no serious process of sending submissions out to qualified referees. Whoever submits, gets published.
Moreover, the exercise of supervision has grown just as flimsy at the other end of the pipeline, something visible in a doctoral thesis dashed off with a report from a supervisor who has not properly read it. The viva voce sadly stands reduced to a formality so thin that those who sit through it treat it as something of a joke.
The absurdity reaches its peak at the vice-chancellor’s chair. Search committees have been observed asking candidates how many patents they hold — a question with no relevance whatsoever outside a narrow band of applied science. The answer has been observed to favour candidates from the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields almost by design. This is because a scientist running a large laboratory can attach his name to every research candidate’s paper that passes through it, thus inflating a publication count which no humanities scholar working alone could ever match.
Such a candidate arrives at the vice-chancellor’s office having spent an entire career inside one laboratory, with no exposure to the university beyond it. It would not be incorrect at all to say that a vice-chancellor of this kind has, in many cases, never read a novel or a poem, and he is being asked to preside over an institution whose purpose is precisely the cultivation of minds beyond the laboratory.
None of this can be fixed by adjusting the metrics alone, because a great many selections never really turn on metrics in the first place. Too many appointments in Indian universities are settled by networking rather than judgment. Merit, in such cases, was never actually the criterion being weighed.
This writer’s own interview for the post of associate professor had a committee of four of the most eminent professors in the country, headed by a genuinely learned vice-chancellor; the interview was conducted for over 40 minutes. It was a rigorous, unhurried conversation, and the selection that followed was entirely fair, without a single string pulled on anyone’s behalf. That is the standard against which today’s appointments, and for that matter today’s admissions, ought to be measured.
Let us be clear. Harsher laws will not repair a broken system. Penalties for examiners and testing agencies may punish a lapse, but they do nothing to prevent it. If we want universities that can compete globally, we must start where quality is actually made. This is happening in university departments through appointments made by peers who are willing to be answerable for their judgment. This is the operating logic observed at many universities of higher learning.
Not for reasons of nostalgia
Decentralising examinations back to faculties, and restoring appointments to peer scrutiny and not point-scoring, is not a wistful turn. It is a claim about what a university is for. It demands more time, more accountability, and the courage to defend a choice without a number to hide behind. In return, it gives institutions back their proper responsibility to select candidates not for “cracking” the examination, but for their intellectual competence. If we want universities that form minds rather than calculate scores, we must restore our trust in the academic judgement of those who work within them. Their integrity should be the measure of their decisions, and society must ultimately hold them accountable not for the scores they assign but for the quality of their judgement.
Shelley Walia has taught cultural and literary theory at Panjab University Chandigarh