Plus Two

It looks like the TN Govt has passed a bill to abolish the Common Enterance Test to the Engineering and Medical Colleges. The reason they give is that the students from rural areas does not have all the facilities of the city students to get coached for the Enterance Exam.

Interestingly it is mentioned in Hindu that former chief minister MGR brought in CET in 1984 for the reason that it will benefit rural students.

To digress a little here, the whole Education system which I have witnessed and undergone is not the way how it should be done.

In our society, the means people use to make their children get educated is to keep saying "Padi.. Padii...", "Vilayadinathu pothum Padi...", "TV paathathu pothum Padi..", "intha coaching class po..", "antha coaching class po..", "padiiiiiiiiiii", "tution poneya...".

The way many children consider/considered(including me) the whole concept of education is it is something which we can achieve only by reading whats given in the text book and ganga or popular guide. The whole concept of education is nothing but question and answers. They are just tuned to jot down the answer once they see a question. They do it not based on the knowledge they gained they do it on an impulse such as Pattern matching. The questions themselves appear as an object with specific pattern and they are tuned to respond to those patterns with some other pattern which they think is the answer. The moment the pattern changes ie you word the question differently, they get confused and they cant find the matching pattern.

The whole goal of education is lost in the process of getting marks. Till now I will not agree that a student who scored 100 is better than one who scored 50 (though there are exceptions).

Objective questions were meant to somewhat eliminate this pattern matching exercise but our guys have made this also into a pattern matching execise by coaching students to such an extent they will know for one question what are the four answers that shoud be given as choices and the right answer as well. This they achieve by conducting coaching classes. They ram thousands of questions into the students heads. Parents are proud to send their children to coaching centers which starts this ramming process early and which will ram more questions and make the students a more efficient machine. I myself went to a coaching class though not a famous one.

Now our loveable government finds that city students have lot of means to become a machine which the rural students lack so let us remove the CET process. I feel instead of removing CET the government should have taken steps to make the whole process efficient.

How can it be done? The change should start from the root. Yes it will be a time consuming exercise. So the government feels abolishing this CET is a easy shortcut. This bill wont achieve what it is meant to achieve instead will create more incompetent people.

Rich students have the option to attend plus two coaching classes which the poor students can't afford. Will the government abholish the plus two public exams?

Another news that is doing rounds is that the government is planning to decrease the pass mark for plus two subjects. Currently you need to score 40 out of 150 and the government is planning to reduce it to 30 out of 150 which is 20%. So if you get 20% you clear the exam. Apart from these there are also plans to remove many lessons from the syllabus.

An open book exam will be a lot better than to remove the entire exam.

We should really appreciate our government for these initiatives. Kudos.