Tamil Nadu is the only state in the country admitting students to professional courses without an entrance examination. A recent research article of Aspiring Minds showed Tamil Nadu ranked last in the state-wise employability of engineers in India in IT services, IT products and BPO. The state focussed on numbers and not on quality… Sadly a number of engineers currently seek jobs as sweepers, sanitary workers, linemen…
Tamil Nadu HAs THE phenomenal record in the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of students for higher education: its GER of 50.4 per cent is almost double the national average and equals the world average. This has become possible primarily due to proactive and innovative measures initiated by successive state governments during the past 15 years.
While it is important to expand the higher education to enhance equity and access for aspiring youth, it is equally important to maintain the quality of higher education, a key factor for employability. Expansion should not be at the cost of quality.
CONCERN for quantity, not quality…
Tamil Nadu, which had around 220 engineering colleges in 2005, now has more than 520 engineering colleges producing more than 2 lakh engineering graduates a year – perhaps the highest in the country. The moot question, however, is – how many of them get gainfully employed? Industry associations like FICCI, CII and NASSCOM say that more than 80 per cent of engineering graduates are not employable due to lack of domain knowledge and employability skills including creativity and critical thinking.
Aspiring Minds, a global job skills credentialling leader, has recently published a research article on “State-Wise Employability of Engineers in India,” in sectors like IT services, IT products and BPOs. Tamil Nadu ranks last among the states in all the three sectors. The study points out that Tamil Nadu lagged behind other states in the average quality of talent and the state was simply focusing on numbers and not on quality. It is really a matter of serious concern.
Engineers seek jobs as sweepers…
Look at the pathetic state of employability: in February 2019, 4600 engineering and MBA graduates had applied for 14 posts of ‘sweepers’ for TN assembly. In November the same year, more than 500 engineers and 3500 graduates had applied for 549 posts of ‘sanitary workers’ in Coimbatore Corporation. For a few posts of ‘linemen’ in Southern Railway, more than 1750 engineering graduates lined up for interview.
I have personally come across instances where engineers are working as servers in restaurants and as delivery boys in courier services and online food delivery agencies. During the past few years, several cases of chain-snatching, drug-smuggling and bank-robbery by engineers have been reported in media.
These examples speak volumes about the poor state of affairs in engineering education in the state and indicate that engineering graduates lack not only employability but also ethical and moral values necessary to lead meaningful lives.
Four important reasons, among others, for the poor quality of our engineering graduates are:
- Low standard of students admitted
- Poor quality of colleges
- Unscrupulous college managements
- Absence of proper quality control and monitoring mechanism
Importance of Entrance Exam
Among these, the input quality of students plays a critical role in producing good quality engineers. The popular dictum in computer science “Garbage-In, Garbage-Out” (GIGO) is aptly valid here. The GIGO model highlights the importance of quality of input in order to produce a
quality output. An entrance examination is the only way to determine the quality of students admitted to professional courses like engineering and medicine.
Two main goals of an entrance exam are:
1 . To judge a student’s knowledge and intelligence levels required for the course.
2 To assess whether the student possesses the necessary “aptitude” to succeed in the discipline.
All over the world entrance exams are a part of admission process of all higher educational institutions and universities and it is all the more important for admission to professional courses. More importantly, an entrance exam applies a common standard to everyone. Since students come from many different streams and boards of examinations, it is imperative to have a unified, robust and all-inclusive entrance exam to measure the equipment of candidates.
Abolition of CET
Common Entrance Test (CET) for admission to professional courses in Tamil Nadu was introduced in 1984-85 and successfully implemented for more than two decades. It was scraped in 2006. In fact, a legislation passed by the
AIADMK government in 2005 to abolish CET was struck down by the High Court holding that it is void, inoperative and unenforceable and also against the regulations of MCI and AICTE. On appeal, the Supreme Court also ruled that admissions to professional courses should be based on CET only.
Incidentally, as the VC of Anna University at that time, I had detailed discussions with the former VCs Dr V C Kulandaiswamy and Dr M Anandakrishnan on the issue of abolition of CET. Both of them categorically held that CET must continue in order to maintain certain minimum level of quality of input students. Surprisingly, the Anandakrishnan Committee appointed in 2006 by the government, recommended the abolition of CET. Strangely, the same High Court, which struck down a similar legislation earlier, upheld this one stating that the proposed act would help the poor and rural students secure admissions in professional courses on the basis of their 12th class marks.
The main reason advanced against CET is that the poor and rural students have no access to coaching institutions and, therefore, CET undermines equity and social justice.
This is not entirely true. In fact, access to coaching centres is similar to access to quality school education. For example, rich and urban students who study in urban-private schools generally secure more marks than the students studying in government schools. Many private schools in the state are run like ‘poultry farms’ where only ‘coaching’ takes place for 12th class students. They charge ‘coaching fee’ much higher than the coaching fee for entrance exams.
Abolition of CET will in no way correct the bias in favour of urban and rich students, as they continue to get the access to private ‘coaching’ schools for getting high marks in 12th exams. It is well known that students from these schools garner a large percentage of seats in medical and engineering colleges on the basis of 12th marks. Where is the equity and inclusion here?
Unscientific Recommendation
The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy in its ‘Policy Watch No 3’ says: “the Anandakrishnan Committee should have probed this issue further. Merely removing the CET and unqualified acceptance of the 12th class marks for admissions are totally unscientific recommendations. Further, the proposed system of normalisation of marks between different board exams is equally unscientific.” (Note the Anandakrishnan Committee report has not been made public. Whatever is known in public is from the gist of the report provided to the High Court.)
Consequences of abolition of CET
Recently, the Minister for Higher Education while speaking to the media, said: “we have removed the entrance exam and also reduced the minimum marks for admission in order to help the rural and poor students.” While making higher education more accessible to poor students is a laudable objective of a government, it is equally important to ensure that only the capable students are allowed to join the professional courses. When we admit students who are not capable, they have a lower probability of completing the course successfully. We must understand that successful completion is the ultimate objective of joining a course. We will do more harm to their future by admitting poor students who cannot successfully complete the course than by not admitting them.
Abolition of CET has led to a number of undesirable developments:
- Most of the schools have become ‘coaching centers.’ They focus on scoring high marks in 12th class through rote learning.
- Subjects of 11th class are not taught in many of these schools.
- Students rarely understand the fundamentals of mathematics and science subjects.
Students’ thinking and problem-solving skills are seldom developed. - As the private coaching schools charge very high fees, only the rich can afford to join these schools.
- Many schools indulge in unethical practices to boost 12th class marks.
- Due to rote learning and lack of 11th class knowledge, students face difficulty in facing national level exams like JEE and NEET.
- More than 60 per cent of Anna University students fail in the first semester every year.
Moreover, from the time of abolition of CET, the performance of engineering colleges has been coming down every year due to poor standard of students entering the colleges. Consider the results of November 2018 semester exams of 482 Anna University affiliated colleges:
Note: hundreds of students who had scored 200 out of 200 in 12th class have failed in the first semester exams of Anna University. While more than 4 lakh engineering students and more than 20 lakh arts and science students had arrears, the state government cancelled all arrear
Exams in August, 2020.
These are matters for concern for all the stakeholders including the government and bring out two important aspects to light:
(1) Need to improve the quality of school education
(2) Need to regulate the quality of input to engineering courses
Commenting on the poor performance of engineering colleges in the state, Dr Anandakrishnan, the then Chairman of IIT Kanpur and a strong proponent of NEET and JEE, said that this was because of the state’s policy to abolish the CET for admission to professional courses.
The Need
It is important to note that the CET does not have a social justice objective. Its sole purpose is to create a level-playing field for students from different boards to compete for admission. The onus of ensuring social justice rests squarely on the school system which must orient itself to address the issue of educational backwardness of certain communities. Removing CET has not in any way corrected the social, economic and educational bias in favour of the rich and urban students as they continue to get access to quality private ‘coaching’ schools.
It showed how the objective for which the CET was abolished was not achieved. Moreover, it has led to many undesirable consequences during the last 15 years.
A robust admission system with minimum marks in Entrance Examination, reorienting the school education system, revamping the examination system and improving the quality of government schools are the way forward to improve the fast deteriorating quality of engineering education in the state and save the future of lakhs of budding engineers.
– The author is a Prof E Balagurusamy former member Union Public Service Commission and a former vice-chancellor, Anna University.
