The Psychological Reality of Entrance Exams Which No One Talks About
By: Abhinanda Dash
Tags: Entrance Examinations, Psychology, Mental Health, Competition, Education

Before I serendipitously landed up at college studying Psychology, I was in the familiar rat race for the prestigious NEET entrance exam. The deep seated self doubt and insecurity which can accompany the 11th — 12th grind can be best summarised by ‘Jeetu Bhaiya’s’ famous monologue in the famed web series Kota Factory.

Kota factory and the effects of Kota

This got me thinking. India displays record numbers of student suicides every year and Kota has been termed as the student suicide capital of the country. The psychological effects of entrance exams and private coaching (Also termed as shadow education) must be investigated thoroughly to prevent this seeming epidemic of student suicides. Previous articles and research have focused on higher rates of stress, depression and anxiety experienced by students of Kota. The causes for their degrading mental health have been chalked down to parental expectations, fear of failure, loneliness, extreme amounts of stress, rigorous coaching routines, and the overwhelming competition faced in these institutes. However, the deeper, structural issues which often lead to long term effects in the students have not been studied as thoroughly as they should be.

Here are three of my hypothesized effects of the Indian entrance + coaching system which are based on personal anecdotes and a few articles I found during my research for this post. Most of my insights are based on Indian entrance exams, but I believe they can be generalized to other countries where similar testing is followed. However I am not in principle against standardized testing, but against the way itis executed in India.

Entrance Exams can cause De-individuation

The American psychological Association defines Deindividuation as:

“ An experiential state characterized by loss of self-awareness, altered perceptions, and a reduction of inner restraints that results in the performance of unusual and sometimes antisocial behavior”

Essentially this means that individuals lose their sense of personal identity and self evaluation to a group. The scary thing about deindividuation is that it encourages mob mentality, and is often seen in cases of religious extremism, cults and gangs. It can be caused by a number of factors, such as a sense of anonymity or submersion in a group. Students who are preparing for competitive entrance exams are enthusiastically encouraged to let go of all aspects of their personal identity which makes them unique from others. Tamoghna Ghosh came out with her story on preparing for IIT JEE at Kota. In the article she talked about her loss of creative ability saying:

“By the time I was done with Kota, I was hardly recognisable. I had lost my creative enthusiasm. I couldn’t write a single good poem. That was coming from a girl who’d write poems by the dozen, every other week. I hadn’t read a good book in years. My ability to reason and logic, in short, my IQ, for which I had received many an accolade in life, had reached an all-time low. I was just a robot who’d been programmed with the essential commands to crack IIT-JEE and think no more.”

Unfortunately, Tamoghna’s experience seems to be the norm rather than the exception. Vox Populi, which is the student media body of IIT Kanpur, conducted a survey of 212 students of the institution who had previously studied at Kota. Nearly 80% of the sample indicated that their creativity had been impacted to a certain extent during their stay at Kota. Another study on students of Kota indicated that nearly 41% of the participants knew about the benefits of exercise, but neglected the same due to lack of time.

During exam preparation, students are encouraged to give up anything which does not directly relate to their preparation. friendships, hobbies and side passions are simply labelled as ‘distractions’. Hence in the short run individuals may develop a single minded focus (or more likely; an unhealthy obsession) with clearing an exam. In the long term, holistic personality development, communication skills and creativity are seriously hindered. By reducing students to mere roll numbers and ranks on various test series, these institutions strongly associate an individual’s entire self concept with the achievement of a particular target (eg; the hallowed IIT/AIIMS worthy ranks). This runs the risk of a student facing a sense of worthlessness/purposelessness if they have subjectively failed in achieving their all consuming goal. This may explain the elevated student suicide rates seen in students due to an exaggerated fear of failure .

The effects of Deindividuation were seen in the classic study by Zimbardo in 1971. The study assigned random roles to volunteers as prisoners and guards of an artificial prison. The experiment was to last for two weeks and everyone was told to play the role in their assigned group. However, the time frame had to be cut short and the experiment stopped after only six days. As a group, the guards were treating the prisoners so badly that they could not continue on with the activities. I’ve often thought about how Coaching centres often act as real life simulations of this classic experiment where the ‘prisoners’ have a fixed inhumane routine and lack of personal autonomy, which is complemented by the administration/society acting as prison guards who often reinforce these problematic patterns by guilting and shaming the students.

In this article, Anurag Mehra, professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Faculty at the Center for Policy Studies, at IIT Bombay said “ Coaching classes are unregulated, which means that administrators and teachers can indulge in all kinds of discrimination in the name of “brilliance” (or lack of it) — performance-shaming, scolding, taunting — all adding up to feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.​ And finally, the relentless bearing of the burden of expectations of parents, of the fear of letting them down, accompanied by the awareness of the debt that their families may have incurred to finance this ultimate liberation.”

2. It creates A VERY unhealthy Motivational Climate

According to Passer and Smith (2008), Motivation is defined as a process that influences the direction, persistence, and vigor of goal directed behavior. Obviously this is a key concept which comes to play during preparation for entrance exams. The best teachers at famed coaching centres often double down as educators, counselors and motivational speakers.

The 2x2 Achievement Goal Theory focuses on the manner in which success is defined both by the individual and within the achievement situation itself. At the individual level one might have a mastery orientation where the focus is on personal improvement, giving maximum effort and perfecting new skills. In contrast to this, an ego orientation involves being motivated by the desire to outperform others. Entrance exams can be attempted by individuals having both types of orientations. However, I think it is fair to assume that it will attract a greater number of individuals who have ego approach goals (competitive orientation focused on outperforming others in contrast to ego avoidance goals which focus on avoiding being outperformed by others).

Now let’s focus on the second part of the theory which is the achievement climate. In an ego involving climate, performers are compared with one another, urged to compete to be the best, and those who perform the best, get special attention. In a mastery involving climate, effort, enjoyment of the activity, and personal improvement are emphasized and rewarded (Passer and Smith, 2008). Even a cursory understanding of this theory will reveal that entrance examinations brutally push an ego oriented motivational climate.

Achievement Motivation theory adopted from passer and Smith, 2008

This video perfectly encapsulates how entrance exams bias teaching and the science curriculum towards easy formulae and tricks to crack the maximum MCQ questions on test papers. Rather than talking about the double slit experiment, and its implications for quantum mechanics and optics, one is rushed towards lengthy numericals in HC Verma and Halliday. The ego orientation in entrance exams is humorously displayed in Kota factory’s first episode. Vaibhav (The protagonist of the show) struggles to solve a test to get a higher batch in his Kota coaching class. This is followed by a montage of him and his friends running across Kota trying to persuade individuals into solving the paper. Finally Vaibhav realizes that most of the questions must be taken from some physics guide or the other, and they spend the entire night scouring various physics textbooks to crack the test. This is unfortunately a common learning technique. Coaching teachers often encourage students to practice ‘more questions’ in the hopes that similar questions can be attempted on the basis of memory and practice. Another aspect of entrance exams is the speed with which a question has to be solved within the test environment. Again, rather than involving an inherent understanding of the concept, speed testing requires the knowledge of useful tricks to get around as many items as possible.

In this video, Australian professors react to the JEE Advanced paper. There are certain comments about the entrance exam which are quite revealing about the kind of culture/motivation orientation they propagate.

“I had a look at a couple of the one-hour math sections of papers and I would say I would be fairly challenged to get a decent result on those in an hour, partly because as a professional mathematician I’m interested in actually telling a story. When I answer a problem, I want to lay out why the answer I’m producing is the answer. Simply being able to say the answer is 27 to me is not so helpful or so interesting. In terms of future success in in mathematics, or indeed in many scientific disciplines the ability to reason properly and to explain your reasoning clearly is terribly terribly important. So while I have no reason to believe that using the exam the way it’s used isn’t selecting very bright students for the engineering colleges that they’re going to, it’s not clear to me that it’s the optimal selector of that, and there is also the ugly question of coaching and unequal access to resources…. But with these race against the clock style examinations there’s a trade-off between the student’s ability in the subject, natural intelligence and other things like that and having been trained to deal about examinations of this type.”

- Professor Barry Hughes (Member of the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Melbourne.)

“So when you have a large pool of candidates and only small number of spaces, they usually have drill exams because what they’re showing is whether the candidate is serious enough, whether they’re able to practice and how they perform under time limited pressure, environment and conditions. They’re not necessarily predictors of whether that candidate will then do very well in the next step of Education.”

- Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway (lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University).

“So yeah, when I looked through it (The JEE paper) there were a lot of questions that are based very much on this sort of principle of memorization and recitation, which I think is just an extraordinarily bad educational tool because it assumes that everyone has the exact same capabilities in that area. As someone who never had a great memory for these things and had to work extra hard and then became a professional physicist for over a decade, you realize very quickly that those particular skills don’t help you much once you’re actually working as a scientist, because you now get to the point where the material you’re working with is so complicated that you just don’t remember. No one could remember it. So this skill of memorization and recitation is not not as helpful as people might think.”

- Dr. Shane Huntington ( Principal Strategy Adviser to Professor James Angus, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences)

In the video, professor Barry Hughes loosely relates the JEE exam to the Mathematical Tripos which was conducted at Cambridge. According to Alexander Macfarlane, famous Mathematician and Physicist’s description, the mathematical Tripos seems almost eerily similar to our current JEE exam.

“To obtain high honors in the Mathematical Tripos, a student must put himself in special training under a mathematican, technically called a coach, who is not one of the regular college instructors, nor one of the University professors, but simply makes a private business of training men to pass that particular examination. Skill consists in the rate at which one can solve and more especially write out the solution of problems. It is excellent training of a kind, but there is no time for studying fundamental principles, still less for making any philosophical investigations. Mathematical insight is something higher than skill in solving problems; consequently the senior wrangler (Topper) has not always turned out the most distinguished mathematician in after life.”

Not only was the Mathematical tripos extremely difficult, it also served as an indicator of the brightest minds of the nation and of individuals possessing extraordinary intellect and ability. This is very similar to how cracking entrance exams in India almost serves as a status symbol, differentiating the chosen few from the rest of the massive population. As G.H. Hardy (Great mathematician who was responsible for bringing Ramanujan to fame) described the mathematical Tripos here:

“It is evident that such an examination is not content with fulfilling the ends which I have admitted that an examination can fulfil so well; it is not, and prides itself that it is not, merely a useful test of industry, intelligence, and comprehension. It purports to appraise, and it must be admitted that to some extent, though very imperfectly, it does appraise, higher gifts than these.”

Infact, even Cambridge brought in reforms regarding the Mathematical Tripos in 1909, and now exists in its more modern, less evil form. G.H. Hardy even delivered a presidential address to the Mathematical Association and critiqued the mathematical Tripos saying;

“It has often been said that Tripos mathematics was a collection of elaborate futilities, and the accusation is broadly true. My own opinion is that this is the inevitable result, in a mathematical examination, of high standards and traditions. The examiner is not allowed to content himself with testing the competence and the knowledge of the candidates; his instructions are to provide a test of more than that, of initiative, imagination, and even of some sort of originality. And as there is only one test of originality in mathematics, namely the accomplishment of original work, and as it is useless to ask a youth of twenty-two to perform original research under examination conditions, the examination necessarily degenerates into a kind of game, and instruction for it into initiation into a series of stunts and tricks. It was in any case certainly true, at the time of which I am speaking, that an undergraduate might study mathematics diligently throughout the whole of his career, and attain the very highest honours in the examination, without having acquired, and indeed without having encountered, any knowledge at all of any of the ideas which dominate modern mathematical thought. “

If the numerous Highly acclaimed mathematicians don’t convince you, here’s some research concerning the demerits of an ego achieving environment rather than a mastery achieving environment. Mastery achieving environments leads to higher intrinsic motivation, self esteem and lower performance anxiety because it emphasizes skill development and performing one’s best. An ego achievement climate may lead to the belief that ability rather than hard work, leads to success and satisfaction may be gained through outperforming others rather than through skill improvement. Finally, a mastery climate has resulted in higher skill development and performance levels due to increased effort, greater enjoyment and lowered anxiety (Dweck, 1999; McArdle & Duda, 2002 as cited in Passer & Smith, 2008). There is a disturbing tendency for students in India to take gap years in order to “perform better” in their entrance exams the next time. These decisions are often not based on rational grounds of obtaining their desired course and experience, but rather to achieve the status associated with an unrealistic rank. These ranks are often influenced by several factors such as socioeconomic status, luck etc. Hence, precious time and resources are often wasted on “trying to be the best” rather than focusing on pursuing one’s passions and exploring topics of interest in depth.

3. It Can Make You Culturally Clash with Yourself

The cultural identity of a society can be Individualistic or Collectivistic. An individualistic society emphasizes the importance of the individual, personal responsibility, rewards, autonomy and goals. America is usually considered to be an extremely individualistic society where personal liberty is very much ingrained in their cultural framework. In contrast, Collectivistic societies value the group over the individual. It emphasizes long term relationships, the importance of family, and personal sacrifice for the greater good of the collective group.

India is very obviously a collectivistic society. The ‘Log Kya Kahenge’ mentality often influences key decisions in an individual’s life ranging from their careers to their life partners. The importance of collaboration and treating family, guests and members of society with the utmost respect is ingrained into our personalities (Sanskar).

Entrance exams can be very self destructive for Indian society. On the one hand, individuals are often forced towards them in order to conform to what society considers desirable and acceptable. On the other hand, entrance exams in India often promote a very individualistic outlook towards life. In this extremely competitive environment, students are often conditioned to renounce long term friendships and relationships, focus on themselves alone, and only treat other colleagues or batchmates as sources of competition.

In the last episode of Kota factory, Vaibhav moves away from his friends (His friend Meena tells him to focus on his studies because “Friendship is not revision which MUST be done”). He also gives up a potential relationship with a girl called Vartika because he must crack IIT. Alone. In the picture from The Quint’s documentary on Kota, there is a false dichotomy between having friends, attending birthday parties and the “Right Track” which involves sacrifice and love with studies alone. Only the right track can help you crack the entrance exam, otherwise one will have to *shudder* go home.

The Quint’s Documentary: Why Kota kills

The effects of such conditioning can be predictably disastrous. Let’s assume that kids on the “Right Track” end up cracking their institution of choice. By disregarding friendship and relationships as normal parts of life, students may experience isolation and loneliness. This is also the key period for learning and inculcating relationship skills which are essential in a collectivistic society. It creates a false dichotomy between an individual’s career vs all other relationships, which may continue well after graduating, and disturb work life balance later in life.

After graduating, students may experience an internal clash with their own cultural identity. This might also be the reason for the increasing brain drain from India to America, even though our economy is technically doing better than before. Intellectuals who choose to stay in India often have the odds against them. Our country has several problems; low respect for intellectuals, poor quality of education, a lack of jobs and severe lack of infrastructure. In these cases it is almost always individuals who have been socialized into having a higher sense of community and a strong cultural identity who make the tradeoff between the better resources of the West and the inevitable career struggle back home seem worth it. Maybe students can better relate to the competitive, cut throat environment of the West where setting oneself apart from others is appreciated in contrast to India where organisations tend to emphasize teamwork and collaboration.

Finally, I think the overarching sentiment amongst most Indians is that entrance exams are required because “We ArE a MeRiToCrAcY”. However, I’ve not even covered the uncomfortable questions regarding unequal access to resources, the substandard quality of education within these premier institutions and caste based discrimination which students face on campus, which clearly flies in the face of equality of opportunity. Maybe these entrance exams are so difficult to prevent students from asking questions. Questions like why did MHRD increase the Mtech fees at IIT’s by almost 900%? Why are there such few college seats which are actually affordable, and why do only 1% of these colleges actually provide decent chances of employment and opportunity after graduating? Maybe the psychological effects of entrance exams in India can be summarized by Jeetu Bhaiya’s line; “bacche Do saalon mein Kota se nikal jaate hai, Kota saalon tak bacchon se nahi nikalta.”

References