Et tu, CUET?
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"Kai Su, Teknon", cried Caesar. It was the last stab at Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic. Seutonius, in around 100 AD wrote this, which according to several linguists means “Screw you, kid”. Contrary to the writings of the Bard of Avon, it wasn’t “You, too, Brutus”. It was far more brut-al than it. I allow the readers to choose either of the two interpretations based on their reading of this brief post on the CUET.
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| You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. |
The CUET stands for Common University Entrance Test, but one of its official websites is still unable to decide the first word of the acronym.
Brought to counter the super high cut-offs to get into Delhi University, CUET became the very thing it sought to destroy. Last year, Hindu College and SRCC saw “extraordinary homogeneity” where in the Political Science course at the Hindu College, 99 out of 100 applicants who had scored a hundred per cent in the Senior Secondary were from the Kerala Board. There was no filter except the reservations and the class 12 marks to admit the students into the colleges. To put an end to it, the CUET was brought to the “ranbhoomi” or the battlefield, but in retrospect, we realize, the place where it was brought was the “rangbhoomi” or a comedy theatre. More than twenty thousand students scored a perfect score in at least one subject in the exam. As a Times of India article appropriately stated, we’re back to square one where the CUET failed to make any positive impact.
The CUET was hosted in six phases. To directly quote the statistics involved: in the CUET UG Exam, a total of 14,90,293 candidates registered, and 9,68,201 candidates appeared for the exam across 249 cities in India and 10 cities outside India. These applicants submitted 54,555 different combinations of topic applications to 90 universities. The total number of question papers was 2,219, and the number of questions was 50,476.
The exam was hosted in the MCQ format. My analysis will stick to the Humanities aspect of the MCQ Syndrome. Several commentators and I believe that this strong affinity of the Indian Education System towards the multiple choice question format would lead the country to nowhere. Humanities is a subject with varied interpretations. There could be several facets of a single statement. MCQ format in the humanities destroys the very essence of the subject. The examiners are unable to frame the questions properly, and very often, this leads to situations where multiple correct answers are possible for a single question. This happened in Semester-1 of the ISC Examination as well. I published that absurdity on my blog, and mailed it to the concerned authorities. As expected, I didn’t receive any response from them. Objectivity and rote memorization are given more preference than a subjective and analytic mind in the MCQ Exams. This defeats the very purpose of the existence of humanities as a stream.
If flaws were a sport, this exam would be an Olympics. The official website was supposed to go live on April 2nd, 2022. An expected delay arrived, and it went live on April 6th, 2022. The exam took place on different dates from July 15th to September 11th. Would you like to know the best part about it? The dates were announced on the evening of July 11th, 2022. Can you imagine the difference in the preparation of the students who gave their exams on July 15th and September 11th?
Of course, it was one of the biggest exams in the world, but the applicants paid a good amount of money to the Government only because they hoped that the latter would ensure a smooth procedure. There were last-minute centre changes, postponements, and technical glitches! Almost every day, there was news of exams being postponed due to technical glitches.
I had all four of my exams on July 19th, 2022. On the eve of the exam, most of us received a text message where it was written that there was a change in the exam centre. It was a glitch. Can you imagine the chaos it created? For hours, there wasn’t any clarification from the NTA. Mails, tweets, calls - nothing worked. After a few hours, we received a mail that asked us to ignore the glitch.
My economics exam was scheduled for the evening. Suddenly in the middle of the exam, we discovered that we weren’t able to move to the next question. Probably, it happened with the whole room. For more than 20 minutes, there was chaos in the exam hall. After about 20 minutes, the screen automatically resumed. There was no professional in the centre who could determine the cause of this huge glitch. During these 20 minutes, students were speaking with each other. The invigilators acted as if nothing serious took place. It was around 4 pm, and most of us were on the campus since 5:30 am. After two years of study in the lockdown, we were provided one day where we could prove our memorization skills. Can you think about the amount of stress the students who didn’t have any option other than the CUET would have felt at that moment? And the NTA didn’t postpone the exam!
The country is still recovering from the after-effects of Covid-19. Why was it so urgent for the Government of India to implement the CUET this year without any concrete planning? CISCE and CBSE implemented a two-semester approach to calculate the marks. I can’t speak for the CBSE, but for the ISC, it proved to be a huge disaster. The Ministry of Education failed to learn from the other boards that a new idea for such a huge number of students cannot be implemented without proper planning. Let’s not even dive into the details of how many times the delays took place. Managed by people with no rational and genuine thought process, the CUET proved to be a huge disaster.
“I am surprised at these phenomena, and that it is not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charges.”
Some students had to travel hundreds of miles only to be greeted by the notice of the exam being postponed. The fee for the two slots was INR 1300. The fee to challenge the provisional answer key prepared by the “experts” was INR 300 per question. Firstly, why did we have to pay this amount of money just because the so-called experts at the NTA weren’t able to frame or understand the question and the subject properly? The per capita income in India is just a thousand INR above 90,000 INR. Forget about the marginalised sections of society, even a well-off family cannot pay such an amount of money if they spot more than four or five errors by our “qualified experts” in the provisional answer key set. And secondly, if we paid such a huge amount of money for each question, why: a) was the final answer key not released; b) were the reasons due to which our options weren’t accepted weren’t conveyed to the students who had challenged the provisional answer key?
I had challenged three answers in the provisional answer key set with substantial pieces of evidence that supported my arguments, and none of the answers was deemed correct by the experts. We don’t even know if they actually went through our challenge petitions. To bring an end to this war of ifs and buts, I filed an RTI application on the very day the result was declared. I’m waiting for their response. It would be pretty interesting to find out if the qualified academicians actually went through all our challenges.
Humanities was the only stream that was untouched by the tentacles of the Coaching Mafia. The Mafia takes advantage of the helplessness of the people for their own selfish needs. A Mafia that made Kota, the suicide capital of India, and was responsible for the Agnipath Scheme Riots in Bihar. Already several coaching institutes have started their courses on the CUET. The privileged students will get exposure to all such resources. Dummy schools will become a norm. The number of students from the State Boards in the top Central Universities will drastically reduce. Private Colleges and Universities will bloom. Of course, there’s nothing legally wrong with this. The end that the students, parents, and the Coaching Mafia require is the successful admission of the students into their so-called dream colleges. But, Bharat, dear readers, is not a fictional world of a Mario Puzo Novel. She has an end that is not limited to the selfish requirements of a few individuals. This shall lead us nowhere.
The Macaulian thoughts are still alive, and if the grave of Macaulay at Westminster Abbey is dug today; one wouldn’t be surprised to find a supercilious and satisfied smile on the structure of his face.
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