In our country, most colleges and central universities for admissions and government institutions in need of employees require aspirants to take exams. As a result, most students sit for IIT-JEE, NEET, CLAT, CAT, UPSC, SSC and other State Service exams.
Many students have to live in major cities and pay for travel, rent and food to prepare for these exams. They are also a major source of income for book shops and cyber cafes, flat and PG owners.
Researchers have revealed that students from affluent families have many advantages compared to students coming from normal families. The family income greatly influences a student’s performance in these tests.
In 2013, in a paper titled, Race, Poverty and SAT Scores, researchers Ezekiel J Dixon-Roman from the University of Pennsylvania and John J McArdle from the University of Southern California revealed that wealthy students earn higher SAT scores compared to those from low-income families.
In a recent study conducted by a high-level committee headed by Justice A K Rajan, a retired High Court judge, it has been found that the practice of preparing for and taking the National Entrance cum Eligibility Test (NEET) has led to a radical decrease in the enrolment of students belonging to weaker socio-economic backgrounds in MBBS courses across government and self-financed medical colleges in Tamil Nadu.
India, as we know, is one of the world’s most unequal countries when it comes to income. According to an Oxfam report, 77.4% of the country’s wealth is owned by 10% of the population, whereas the bottom 60% of the population owns only 4.8% of the wealth. This inequality is then naturally reflected in access to good education, and thus, job opportunities.
As mentioned above, admission to a good medical, engineering or law college is governed by competitive entrance examinations. These examinations are often called “merit-based” and they claim to test the objective skills in entrance examinations with a given syllabus.
A point that makes these exams even more unequal and unfair is that most of these exams are now objective (at least in the preliminary stage) which prevents students from putting across their unique viewpoints and perspective. It also leads to the promotion of rote learning.
These exams, thus, massively benefit the affluent students. Unfortunately, privilege in our society is often confused with merit. Access to fancy colleges and top government jobs depends on one’s economic and social status. It further decides their access to private coaching centres and private schooling.
For students from low-income families, it is impossible to break these barriers as the economic costs are unaffordable for them.
In exams such as IIT-JEE, NEET, UPSC, etc., access to coaching classes has a life-altering impact. The chances and abilities of a particular student going to a good government college depend on their access to private coaching centres. It has less to do with merit and more to do with the money that the parents of these students are spending.
Therefore, it can be argued that colleges’ policy to take in students based only on test scores might be a sort of indirect discrimination based on the socio-economic conditions of these people. We must also keep in mind that this impact is even more strong by structural inequalities that generally prevail in the society: of wealth, education or social status.
A lot of studies and a simple glance at the society will tell us that the representation of upper caste people in higher education is much higher than the others such as the OBCs, Scheduled Castes, and Tribes. The same rule applies to men compared to women in higher education and well-paying jobs.
Many people believe that to get a more fair and equal society, these competitive exams must be taken away in favour of a fairer system that reduces the burden on underprivileged and poor students.
Another point of contention is the use of the English language in competitive exams. Proficiency in the English language is a result of cultural and social capital. The poor students of state boards and government schools are not comfortable using English in these exams as it is not their medium of instruction.
Though UPSC and IIT-JEE, NEET exams offer questions in Hindi, the vocabulary of these exams is mostly in English.
In a New York Times article, Ginia Bellafante suggested an alternative. She said that a lottery system could be put in place wherein we randomly select students to Ivy League universities. It would be much fairer, according to her.
No matter how strange it sounds, this suggestion can actually give equal chances to all the rich and poor than granting opportunities only to the privileged.
In India, the famous Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has employed a different and unique system of deprivation points for admission to some courses. Under this system, if a student comes from a backward and rural area, or they come from an area with a low literacy rate or low agricultural productivity, some points are added for them, and thus, it automatically increases their chances for admission.
We need more creative and effective proposals like these to reduce the unfair impact of entrance exams on poor students, which must be further explored to give them a fair chance to compete. The hope is that the inclusion of socio-economic status as an impermissible ground of discrimination in the law will motivate conversations towards that aim.