Do exams have to be this awful?

Our refusal to acknowledge the trauma associated with our education system will, eventually, lead us to harm. Representation pic

China holds an annual admission exam for undergraduates each year, called the Nationwide Unified Examination for Admissions to General Universities and Colleges. Referred to locally as Gaokao, it goes on for a couple of days, and supposedly defines the future of millions of young students because of how it grants them access to good universities or condemns them to weaker ones. For years now, much has been written about the anxiety caused by this examination, and why it may be the most stressful in the world. Nothing about it appears to have changed though.

I thought about the Gaokao a few weeks ago, as reports about the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test fiasco began to emerge. There were all kinds of allegations flying around, involving errors in the question paper, compensatory marks dispensed by examiners and outright fraud in some instances. Not enough attention was paid to how the careers of millions of aspirants were jeopardised overnight, but that is to be expected in a country where examinations and fraud are linked so often that eyebrows aren't raised any longer.

It reminded me of my Board exams in what felt like a lifetime ago. I remember little of the examination itself, the subjects, or what I scored in each. What I do recall well enough, decades later, is the intense pressure that began to build midway through my ninth year at school and picked up steam the minute our first semester of Std X began. There were study guides on every desk, journeys to and from coaching classes, exchanges of notes, and endless discussions on the pros and cons of study techniques.

When the examination date eventually arrived, I remember walking into my designated centre, a rundown government-funded school somewhere in the suburb of Malad and sitting down in a classroom where the desks had holes gouged into them. The fans didn't work either, because their blades had been manually twisted in an inexplicable act of vandalism. Looking back, I am appalled not by the condition of those classrooms as much as I am by the casual cruelty of a system that hasn't changed since the time my parents went to school. The ruthlessness of that examination has stayed because no one has attempted to make it more humane.

The argument that private schools are better managed and less stressful holds no water here, because change ought to be measured by its impact on the majority, not by a minority that can pay exorbitant fees, thanks to widening economic gaps between rich and poor. A simple Google search on education scandals in India reveals a list that should horrify any government that genuinely cares about its citizens. What we get, instead, are memes created by social media teams to boost the profiles of ministers tasked with bringing about reform.

It isn't normal for a society to accept the notion of a paper leaking, but I can recall those conversations occurring with startling regularity while I was in school. I have no idea if my parents dealt with them too, but I recently asked friends about their own experiences and found them to be similar. Where there is an examination, apparently, there is a rumour of a paper leaking and being available for a price. The fact that this hasn't prompted any serious change in how we conduct examinations is hard to fathom.

When the world outside our borders thinks of examinations in India, I wonder if they imagine an army of well-trained individuals doing their best to acquire a great education. What they are confronted with instead are photographs from rural India that go viral, of students hanging outside classroom windows to help their classmates cheat. It isn't hard to see, then, why so many organisations abroad think of Indian engineers, doctors or managers as unemployable. Our refusal to acknowledge the trauma associated with our education system will, eventually, lead us to harm. For now, all we will do is wring our hands and commiserate with the 200,000 students who registered for the NEET-PG examination this year. We will move on and expect them to do so too.

I don't want to comment on theories about why India's education system is being dismantled, or how governments in other countries follow this playbook to privatise what is supposed to be a public duty and expenditure. What I do want to consider is the sadness of students who inevitably fall through the cracks because we can't be bothered to insist on change.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper