Government - Don't mess with the JEE

The move to tinker with the JEE* is an example of BAD intentions to spoil something that has worked well for the country. Needless to say there is always scope for improvement of a selection criteria that focuses on merit and is devoid of political meddling and corruption.


It seem to be a politically motivated "vote-bank" or "money-grabbing" idea to curry favour with some constituents or other. Don't these people have better things to do, to improve the plight of the millions of poor in India? Instead of improving people's lives, the prevailing tactic is to lower existing standards to enable "inclusive growth".


The proposal at hand is to change the format of the JEE exam with a preliminary aptitude test, with a 40% weight to the entrance test with Board exam results. The following Scenarios depict some of the possible outcomes:


Scenario 1: It is a non-issue.

The advocates of this moronic idea don't realize the varied levels of the different Boards. Normalizing them is a major challenge. Many students score a greater than 100% result. One possibility is that there will be grade inflation in the harder Boards so that their graduates can compete effectively. And if most of the applicants have greater than 100%, this effectively makes the 40% weight assigned to the Board results a non-issue. Everybody gets the 40%, khullum khula.


Scenario 2: The process crumbles on its own weight.

The JEE is a highly automated test environment capable of handling the massive number of entrants taking the test. Unless the factoring in of this 40% weight into the JEE results is automated, i.e matching the entrants with their Board marks, and the number entered accurately, the process will be fraught with errors. This idiotic idea of ascribing 40% weight to the Board exam adds so much weight to the process that it becomes impossible to implement efficiently and accurately.


Scenario 3: Institute a common Board exam:
That is what the two step JEE was and that was kabashed.


Scenario 4: Bye Bye UPA

The UPA fails to be the next governing body and this issue gets shunted to oblivion.


Scenario 5: Hurting Minority sentiments

The IIT graduates are a minority community and tinkering with this "Sacred Cow" hurts the sentiment of this community. Once this community starts expressing their "hurt", the UPA government which excels in appeasing minorities will be forced to withdraw this effort.


Scenario 5: Non-cooperation

The patriotic faculty could just put its foot down and say this is just not feasible citing Scenario 2. This would force the MHRD to institute a software project to automate factoring in the weighting of the Board results and hopefully it will be assigned to the duds Murthy referred to in his whine and the project will never be completed to fruition.


* JEE - The Joint Entrance Exam that students appear for admission to the IITs