This shit is so crazy. A bit of an old news but I don't know if people outside of India caught wind of this.
The National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under India’s Ministry of Education that is responsible for holding the nationwide examinations, is at the centre of these controversies over the integrity of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), a national exam for medical aspirants held last month.
There are two NEET exams, one for undergrad and one for postgrad. The former was held but the results have been scrapped. The latter has been postponed. The postponement was announced the night before the exam.
The scale of foul play is something that I have not been able to wrap my head around mostly because I have not read the news articles about this recently. There were reports of some participants getting marks that were mathematically impossible and shit like that.
"Autonomous bodies" have become an extension of the ruling party. For example, BJP uses the Election Commision to arrest opposition leaders and freeze the funds of opposition parties. I wouldn't be surprised if the NTA was chock full of deadbeat BJP lackeys. Truly a terrible time to be an Indian right now.
This is what entrance exams were made to do by design. This isn’t a bug.
They are entirely designed to lock out students who can’t afford to pay the absurd costs of test prep, while pushing through those students who’s parents could afford tutors that cost severs thousand dollars a month.
A prime example is the LSAT exam in the US for law school.
The exam is graded on a scale of 120-180, with a score above 175 being virtually unheard of due to the difficulty of the exam. Before, a good performance in undergrad combined with a score of at least 150-160 could guarantee you a spot in an top law school. However nowadays, scores have entered a horrific cycle of inflation that to get into any middling or top law school, a score in the high 170s is required, which is absurd. Anything below that is essentially a failure. A score that only 15-20 years ago would be the mark of a savant, has been relegated to only those who have the money to pay for test prep, and the privilege of the luxury of stress free time to study.
Of course; this works to the advantage of the top law schools as they get to isolate the wealthiest for admission, but how many have been locked out of a good law education due to their life circumstances?
Further, what kind of lawyers will those wealthy students become? Statistically they will become corporate “big law” lawyers with extremely high salaries. Leading to mass shortages in public defenders, workers rights workers, and civil rights lawyers. Essentially those who protect the poorest and most oppressed members of society, while simultaneously threatening capital.
I agree with you in essence but there are a lot of differences between USA and India in this context. Prep and tuition fees are inhibiting for most of the potential aspirants but they are much lower than in the US. The result is that way way more people are able to prepare for and take these entrance exams. In the US on the other hand, you first need an ultra expensive undergrad degree, then medical school applications and interviews and so forth. In India, massive tutoring companies are the beneficiaries. Allen Career Institute for example posted a total revenue of about INR 20,000,000,000 last year and there are four or five other companies like this along with the god knows many small businesses and individuals in this sector. All this for preparing high school students for entrance exams. There is a city called Kota in Rajasthan where:
Over 150,000 students from all over the country flock every year towards the city for preparation of various exams such as IIT-JEE and NEET-UG etc.
(Hostels in Kota are outfitted with special ceiling fans designed to prevent suicide by hanging.)
Those who are very wealthy and want to skip this process do one of two things. They either study abroad. Or study in private colleges where admissions can be bought but they are usually not considered prestigious, not that it matters to those already with a lot of wealth. There is little advantage that an extremely wealthy aspirant has in these exams compared to someone who is moderately wealthy or even just upper middle class.
These exams are rather meant as a bottleneck between an extremely large number of aspirants and an extremely low number of vacancies in higher education. The exams are very difficult to present an illusion of meritocracy but the "competitiveness" is a foil for a weak and wanting education system.
Hot take: Medical school should not require any sort of entrance exam or lower degree. Medical school should be the same as trade school, no applying, no MCAT, you just register and begin the program. Extend it by two years to cover the important material expected to be covered by an undergrad degree, and just allow people to sign up
Entrance exams do not in any way actually measure someone’s ability to be a doctor. Neither do half the classes they have to take in undergrad, and certainly not all the extracurricular shit they have to do to make their resumes ridiculously competitive.
All these restrictions do is cause a doctor shortage while clogging up university science classes with the dumbest rich kid yes men you’ve ever met who constantly delayed class ending by not understanding homework instructions and crying if they got an A- because that could mean not getting into med school.
I’m sure this is at least somewhat different in India just judging by the number of Indian immigrant doctors in the US, but I guess part of the way they’ve handled it is just intense corruption
The system you suggest would work in a better society but the whole political economy does the opposite of what it claims to do and what people think it should do.
Like the doctor shortage you mention is very real and severe. But there is no immediate financial incentive in fulfilling it. The ruling class hates public health in general. So the (official) life expectancy is sitting at a cool 68 while potential doctors pursue medicine for money rather than any nobler notions and people blame minority groups for producing "bad" doctors because of affirmative action.
The cause of the shortage has nothing to do with the pre degree required. It is entirely the limited space in medschools and the arbitrary lottery system of the accrediting body, which is corrupt.
The point of half the classes in undergrad is to allow those doctors to branch out and not just be single minded careerists. Those classes are supposed to make them think, experience new viewpoints, broaden their perspectives, and develop them as people. Not taking those classes has the same reasoning as the compsci and engineer students who whine and moan about being forced to take ethics or humanities courses.
Also taking basic biology, anatomy, and chemistry as part of medschool would be extremely inefficient, and the predegree builds a basic level of knowledge that doctors should have going into medschool.
Also of a person stops wanting to be a doctor in undergrad, they can easily switch over, as opposed to your trade school idea which would lock them into a single grouping of career paths unless they drop out.
I agree current systems disproportionally favour wealth over merit but given limited resources how would one filter candidates efficiently to select those truly motivated and disciplined to study? If one approaches the problem by eliminating privatisation of education you can then work towards a more meritocratic system with or without entrance exams?
I’ll be honest I don’t think there are limited resources when it comes to medical schooling, at least in large and/or wealthy countries. The United States could train 10 times as many doctors as we currently do.
I also don’t really see how entrance exams fix that problem even if it does exist. They aren’t entrance exams you take right out of high school, you take them after already taking several years of advanced schooling. So those people are still taking up resources.
You can have “entrance exams” in the same way community colleges do, which is “Can you do algebra and read? If not we’ll have to go back over those.” and then have the first couple years be the fundamentals premed students learn in undergrad. If you couldn’t pass organic chemistry before you still wouldn’t be able to in this version.
Privatization of education isn’t really the problem with medical school (at least in the US), most med schools are at public universities. But they still artificially limit admission and the total students admitted across the country is less than the number of doctors we need and less than the number of students who want to be doctors.
They aren’t entrance exams you take right out of high school
I know this is how it is in US and Canada at least but NEET is taken after high school. Just putting it out there for those unaware.
Ah yes, I did not know that. That seems like a bad idea. I know Germany does something similar and it seems like a bad idea there too.
Another hot take, tests you take as a high schooler should not impact the rest of your life
Yeah. I didn't mean to imply that kids who can't tell ass from mouth should have their career locked in at the age of 18.
You are right in that I should clarify with regards to limited resources; I mean developed infrastructure (both "soft" and hard eg people and buildings) in the context of an underdeveloped country like India and the uneven development in wealthier capitalist countries taken as a whole.
Furthermore we should also consider a privatised system can include "public" infrastructure systems in a capitalist country (there are myriad ways one could analyse this from the financialisation of tuition fees to the contracting out of education materials and infrastructure that is overwhelmingly dictated by the private sector).
My argument is not really for or against entrance exams (this should be determined through peer reviewed research and may be discipline specific) but there are other loci of focus that are of greater importance to avoid higher education just reflecting wealth demographics and bourgoisie sensibilities including the artificial scarcity of higher paid labour.
I also tend to lean towards Paolo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed on a more enlightened path for education.
Addendum: I should add that I actually agree with your initial premise that medical schools should have neither entrance exams nor lower degrees; there are places in the world (geographical/historical) where this is/was the reality. However, we should work towards overthrowing the systems that generate the constraints that you have outlined. We shouldn't just treat the injury of a fallen patient but also question why the patient collapsed in the first place.
I suspect the number of Indian immigrant doctors abroad is due to brain drain rather than an abundance of doctors/lack of need in India.
I wonder how the sangh will spin this to blame "urban naxalites" (if they do).
"Truly a terrible time to be an Indian right now."
I think it was Amartya Sen who claimed an excess of 2.5 million deaths per year since formal end of colonisation compared to China - even taking into account liberal "accounting" of deaths (things like unborn children etc). Unfortunately for the majority it has been a terrible time to be an Indian for about the past few centuries though obviously the fascist hindutva for the past decade has not helped. (Someone with more knowledge please correct this figure if inaccurate)
He wrote about this in 91 from what I know. Don't know of other instances of him talking about this:
Comparing India's death rate of 12 per thousand with China's of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958–61.3
https://academic.oup.com/book/2070/chapter/141991095
It's not India comparing itself. At least not in this instance. It's a study by Amartya Sen et al. The rationale is explained:
When development planning began in China after the revolution (1949) and in India after its independence (1947), both countries were starting from a very low base of economic and social achievement. The gross national product per head in each country was among the lowest in the world, hunger was widespread, the level of illiteracy remarkably high, and life expectancy at birth not far from 40 years. There were many differences between them, but the similarities were quite striking. Since then things have happened in both countries, but the two have moved along quite different routes. A comparison between the achievements of China and India is not easy, but certain contrasts do stand out sharply.
Neet and the stuff surrounding it have been volatile here for a long time. Especially undergrad one. The pg exam and further are whole different can of worms.
I have commented before about how the exams are conducted with corporate involvement. So there's much to think about when looking for people making it through favors from sangh.
But the entrance exams in my country have been contentious for decades. Its pretty hectic. There's a lot of self harm among students who attend them.
I'm not collected with my thoughts right now. But I'll levae it with this : Since SAPs and massive privatization from 90s onward have been devastating. That has led to this ruin of education broadly.
I've been aware of the ills of education privatisation for a long time but I found out only this year about how deep the tendrils of private involvement are in exam conduction, something that requires a very long chain of trust.
