Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pass, Fail, Distinction: The Examination As A Social Institution
Pass, Fail, Distinction: The Examination As A Social Institution
Council of Educational Research and Training
The Third Marjorie Sykes Memorial Lecture
Regional Institute of Education, Ajmer
3rd March, 2010
Pass, Fail, Distinction: The Examination as a Social Institution
Satish Deshpande
Department of Sociology, University of Delhi
It is a great honour for me to be asked to deliver the Third Marjorie Sykes Memorial
Lecture in the Sociology of Education at the Regional Institute of Education, Ajmer. For
doing me this honour, I thank Prof. Krishna Kumar, the Director of the National Council of
Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and his colleagues; and Prof. Jadhav, Principal
of the Regional Institute of Education (RIE) at Ajmer and his colleagues. I am specially
privileged to be speaking here in memory of Marjorie Sykes because I share a somewhat
tenuous connection with her through my late mother‐in‐law, Juliane John (nee Ehrenberg)
who was a friend of Marjorie Sykes in the 1960s and ‘70s, when she was living in Kotagiri
in Tamil Nadu. As strong‐minded, idealistic young women who came to India and made it
their ‘karmabhoomi’ with the intention of performing Christian ‘service’ in the broadest
sense, both Marjorie and Juliane exhibited all the qualities of compassion, commitment
and courage for which their generation is known. Marjorie Sykes was of course an
influential practitioner in the field of education and, as is well known, among the
prominent followers of Gandhi, and is known particularly for her contributions towards
disseminating his ideas on education. I join the NCERT and the RIE in offering tribute to
Marjorie Sykes and her dedication to the cause of Indian education.
1. Introduction 1
Like most parts of the world, India also has four main seasons: summer, winter, monsoon
– and the exam season. We also know that, unlike most parts of the world, each of these
seasons can be lethal in our country. In India there are deaths due to extreme heat or
cold and due to excessive rains and floods. But while it is the extreme forms or unusual
1
Thanks are due to: T.A. Abinandanan and his blog at http://nanopolitan.blogspot.com/ for ideas,
information and links; Anupam Ahuja for her patient but relentless pursuit of this delayed text; Mary E.
John for reading several drafts of this text and suggesting improvements; Krishna Kumar for ideas and
encouragement; and colleagues at the NCERT and the CBSE for introducing me to the complex and
beleaguered world of textbooks and examinations over the past few years. However, the views expressed
here are my own and do not implicate any institution or person.
1
severity of the other three seasons that causes death, the exam season is the only one
that is deadly in its normal course, without extremes. Every year, beginning with the pre‐
exam preparation leave in February and ending with the declaration of results some time
in May, the exam season brings its share of deaths by suicide. Failure in examination is
no longer the only reason that provokes young people to take their own lives; we now
hear of suicides because someone got “only” 55 or 70 or even 90 percent marks. 2 The
pressure of competition and the form of the examination create a situation where, for
most people, actual achievement is constantly fighting a losing battle to catch up with
ever rising expectations and requirements.
An institution that is strong enough to compel people to kill themselves is surely a very
powerful institution, one that deserves careful study. There are a number of issues that
must be kept in mind if we are to understand examinations and their role in society. The
first such issue concerns the level of analysis. This is illustrated by the classic distinction
made by Emile Durkheim in his study of suicide, namely the distinction between the
perspective of an individual and that of society. He argued that while every suicide is
undoubtedly an intensely personal and unique event in each individual case, the rate of
suicide in a country or region is a social fact. Such social facts belong to a different level
of analysis even though they may be nothing but the aggregation of a large number of
individual cases. It is aggregation that brings out the social level – also known as the
‘emergent’ level, because it becomes visible only at high levels of aggregation and
abstraction from individual details. We therefore need to distinguish between individual
experiences associated with examinations and their social role. The two may often
appear totally at odds with each other, but social analysis may help to link the two levels
and to explain why they take the forms they do.
A second issue is that of context. Regardless of the level of analysis, there are different
social situations or contexts within which social facts – events, processes or other
phenomena – acquire meaning. These meanings may be not only different, but
sometimes also conflicting or contradictory. An examination in one context may be
performing a very different role from a similar looking examination in another context,
and we have to be alert to such variations, and avoid imposing a single interpretation on
2
As an aside, an Internet search for “exam suicide”, using a well known search engine and restricted to
pages from India, yields 59,100 items in 0.2 seconds. Most of the first few dozen items retrieved by the
search are media reports on specific examination suicides in various Indian cities. For the most recent, see,
for example, The Times of India of February 11 and February 22, 2010. Similar notices can be found in
almost every newspaper almost every week in the exam season, specially close to the examination dates, and
to the dates when results are declared. But we need more careful studies of this phenomenon to rule out the
possibility of media exaggeration and stereotyping, strong evidence of which has been found for Japan and
Taiwan (see the discussion in section 3c below, as also Zeng 1999).
2
them. This is the sense in which social analysis can yield many context‐specific truths
rather than a single universal truth. We also have to be alert to the risk of misrecognition
or mistaken identity. An examination is often only a symptom, a messenger bringing bad
or good news. Praising or punishing the messenger is of as little help as treating the
symptom rather than the underlying disease that causes it. However, in certain contexts
the symptom‐like or indirect character of the examination is short‐circuited, so to speak,
in order to claim that the examination is direct proof of some desirable quality. So
misrecognition may be accidental, or it may be the outcome of deliberate strategy.
If the level of analysis, the context, and the possibility of misrecognition have all to be
kept in mind when examining examinations, it is also necessary to be aware of the
particular vantage point of the researcher. As a sociologist who has only recently
become involved in various aspects of education, I will be focusing on the broader social
implications of examinations rather than on its scholastic functions. My primary interest
is in contemporary Indian practice, particularly the relationship between education and
inequality. Needless to say a single lecture can hardly hope to cover such a vast terrain
comprehensively; I am well aware – and so should the reader be – that this is but a brief
excursion into the preliminary aspects of the social roles of the examination in our time.
The following account is organised into four sections: Section 2 attempts to orient the
reader by providing, entirely without preamble, a rather bald summary of what recent
scholarship has identified as the main functions of the examination in its scholastic
domain as well as in a broader social context. Section 3 moves back from these specific
functions to take a wider view of the significant lessons to be learnt from the social
history of the examination; it pays particular attention to the tension between
egalitarianism and status‐quo‐ism; the peculiar bond between examinations and the
concept of merit; and the ensemble of experiences and practices that may be termed the
‘culture’ of examinations. Section 4 turns to the Indian context in the light of the
previous discussion in an effort to understand the logic of ‘exit’ and competitive
‘entrance’ examinations. Finally, a brief conclusion offers some speculative remarks on
the future of that remarkably unchanging phenomenon called ‘examination reform’.
2. The Functions of the Examination
This section summarises the received wisdom on the functions of the examination. It
distinguishes the broader societal functions of the examination from its more specialised
functions within the educational system. Of course, both sets of functions are “social” in
3
a general sense, because the educational system is also part of society. Even apart from
this general sense, there is a more specific way in which it can be argued that the
scholastic functions also have close social analogues. However, the distinction is
important because the social functions of the examination may often be invisible or
concealed, whereas the scholastic functions are usually explicitly recognised. Many of
the reasons why “examination reforms” prove ineffective have to do with an incomplete
or inaccurate assessment of the tensions – or synergies – that link the two kinds of
functions.
2a) The scholastic functions of the examination
Although textbooks of education may have longer lists, I will mention only four major
functions of the examination within the educational system:
1) Diagnostic Device: The examination serves as a tool to evaluate learner
progress and the acquisition of relevant competencies. Since such a diagnostic device is
essential to the teaching‐learning process, it could be argued that examinations (of some
sort) would have to be invented if they did not already exist.
2) Method of Standardisation: Examinations, particularly public examinations,
are also devices that help to standardize what could be a very divergent set of
institutions and practices. Because all students – regardless of the countless specificities
that mark their educational careers – must take the same board examination, it is
possible to standardize an otherwise uneven “scholastic product”, namely the student.
3) Device to Monitor Teacher Performance: As is well known, specially to
members of this audience, examinations are also used as a device for measuring teacher
performance. This is often explicitly flagged as an accountability measure, but may
sometimes work as an implicit one, with varying thresholds of performance dependent
on contextual factors.
4) Rite of Passage: Finally, at a somewhat different level, examinations also
function as a rite of passage. Such rites of passage are important social events within the
educational system and have many uses. Most prominent among these is their
socialising effect, including the building of solidarities based on shared stressful
experiences. In this sense, the examination merely reproduces the general form of the
‘coming of age’ test or ordeal found in other social spheres. This is particularly true of
higher level examinations in professional fields, including, for example, the doctoral
degree in most fields, or post‐graduate specialisations in medicine.
What these functions internal to the educational system share is the fact of their being
more or less explicitly recognized. While the latter two functions may be somewhat less
4
explicitly marked than the first two, it is still fair to say that they are all out in the open. A
second shared feature is that all four produce effects that are, for the most part, felt only
within the educational system. It is true that second order effects may radiate outwards
into the larger society, but by and large, the scholastic functions remain localised. I will
return to these functions briefly later in the lecture, but for now, these are not the main
concern of the following argument.
2b) The social functions of the examination
Seen from a broad social perspective rather than a specifically pedagogical one, the
examination seems to have two main functions into which others can be subsumed: It is
a device for gate keeping, or regulation of entry/exit; and it is an apparatus for measuring
merit and producing hierarchised marks of distinction.
1) Gate‐Keeping and Regulatory Device:
The most common function of the examination is as a gate keeping device. This is
inherent in the binary pass‐fail structuring of examination outcomes. In this sense, the
examination is one solution to the social problem of the distribution of scarce resources
in a legitimate and consensual manner. Although there are other methods for dealing
with scarcity, the examination acquires special significance because of its ideological
bases, which in turn are shaped by a more or less deliberate conflation with the second
function, namely measuring merit. The examination forms the basis of the modern
professions, and of rational‐bureaucratic structures of legitimate authority and expertise.
It is one of the techniques of disciplinary power mapped by Michel Foucault and is able to
simultaneously incite or exhort as well as direct and constrain. At a different level, the
examination is also the site where the modern dialectic between ascription and
achievement is staged.
2) Measure of Merit and Marker of Distinction:
In sharp contrast to the dichotomy of pass and fail, the examination also produces the
infinitesimal gradations of relative rank or distinction. While gate keeping deals with the
minimum requirements of eligibility or competence, rank or distinction deals with the
maximum limits of excellence. In this context, the examination functions not like a
rationing device, but as the touchstone for identifying (and ultimately rewarding)
“merit”. As a powerful idea with deep roots in both traditional and modern ideologies,
excellence or merit plays a very important role in shaping the social structures of
legitimation. Part of its power derives from its ability – or its deployment – in translating
the waning forms of past entitlement into the newly ascendant forms of the present.
5
The tensions and contradictory pressures involved in such transitions often make this a
central area of contestation between social groups. As a measure of merit, the
examination must mediate between the conflicting claims of, on the one hand,
individualised, innate talent, and on the other hand, the standardised, impersonal
competences that are typical of modernity.
This rather abstract listing of the functions of the examination is clearly retrospective in
nature. It is only after exams came into existence and had been studied for their effects
that such an account becomes possible. The next section briefly considers the major
theoretical perspectives and broad historical processes through which these functions
have become visible. Particular attention is paid to the social functions of the
examination.
3. Perspectives on Modernity and the Emergence of the Examination
Over the last four decades, a wide range of scholarship from across the social sciences
has helped to transform our understanding of examinations and their place in the history
of the educational system and modern society itself. Three European scholars – Max
Weber, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu – have been particularly influential in
shaping our understanding of examinations today.
As is well known, Weber sees the examination as an integral component of modernity
and its trend towards rationalisation and bureaucratisation (Weber, in Gerth & Mills
1946:240‐43). Seen from this perspective, it is the technical aspects of the examination
that are critical because they contribute towards the efficiency, superior adaptability and
hence the historical staying power of rational‐bureaucratic institutions compared to their
predecessors. The examination contributes towards efficiency by widening the pool from
which talent is recruited; by standardising the content of the training and expertise
inculcated in the examinee; by guaranteeing levels of competence within the prescribed
areas of expertise; and, finally, by offering an open, transparent, and, therefore, more
easily legitimisable justification for recruitment to public office suited to modern
sensibilities.
Weber is at pains to contrast this kind of an examination – one designed to test
specialised knowledge and expertise – from more traditional forms which were
concerned with confirming charisma. By its very definition, charisma cannot be learnt or
taught – being an innate quality, only its presence or absence can be ascertained.
6
However, Weber also recognises a third model of the examination, which is somewhere
between the two in that it is oriented towards the ‘cultivation’ of the student as part of a
preparatory process that trains him/her to inhabit a particular moral‐ethical world and to
practice prescribed forms of conduct. This hybrid model combines the emphasis on
teaching and training of the first model but does not share its exclusive orientation
towards maximising efficiency, for the ultimate ends or the models of conduct towards
which the examination is oriented may involve values and norms that have nothing to do
with instrumental logic. 3
Michel Foucault locates the examination on different terrain, that of disciplinary society
and the novel forms of the power‐knowledge nexus that it inaugurates (Foucault 1977,
specially pp.170‐94). As is well known, his work seeks to present the dark side of
humanism as its indivisible complement. Coinciding historically with the emergence of
capitalism, industry, large cities, and the governmental aspects of the state, disciplinary
society saw the emergence of a variety of technologies of power. Emphasizing the
productive rather than the prohibitive nature of this modern power, Foucault places the
examination within a larger set of institutional practices being developed in the army, the
clinic, the prison, the asylum, the workshop and the school. The examination is a
technique for exercising hierarchical and normalising judgement. Like other techniques
of modern power, the examination renders visible its object (the examinee) while
shielding from view the source of this gaze (the examiner). In this sense, it is part of the
new ‘economy of visibility’ associated with power which runs counter to traditional forms
where the person of the king or the seat of power was rendered visible as against an
anonymous mass of subjects. A characteristic feature of the examination is its ability to
individualise its subjects and to generate a variety of documents and evidence that serve
to render each individual as a ‘case’.
Bourdieu’s main contribution is towards deepening our understanding of the place of the
examination and the educational system in the production and reproduction of social
structure. He is best known for his insightful analyses of the larger ‘economy’ (or system
of interlinked practices) associated with educational qualifications, which are the modern
forms of symbolic and cultural capital critical for social reproduction. Two aspects of
these kinds of capital are specially relevant here – first, their increasing importance in
3
“The charismatic procedure of ancient magical asceticism and the hero trials … merely wished to awaken
and to test a capacity which was considered a purely personal gift of grace. For one can neither teach nor
train for charisma… Specialized and expert schooling attempts to train the pupil for practical usefulness… In
principle, this can be accomplished with anybody, though to varying extent… The pedagogy of cultivation,
finally, attempts to educate a cultivated type of man, whose nature depends on the decisive stratum's
respective ideal of cultivation… In principle this can be done with everybody, only the goal differs.”
(Weber, in Gerth & Mills 1946:426‐7)
7
modern society; and second, the peculiarities that distinguish these forms of property
and determine the modes in which they may be reproduced or transmitted across
generations. Examinations have a significant role to play in this complex field, but this
role is split into a manifest and a latent dimension. On the one hand, exams must help,
tacitly and ‘behind the backs’ of the social actors involved, to reproduce the status quo
by rendering ‘hidden services’
to certain classes by concealing social selection under the guise of technical
selection and legitimating the reproduction of the social hierarchies by
transmuting them into academic hierarchies. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977:153)
On the other hand, exams and the educational system more generally also has a role to
play with respect to social ‘distinction’. If distinction is based on attributes or markers of
‘elevated difference’ that cannot be acquired by formal institutionalised means, then the
examination, being a formal device, appears to represent its antithesis. However, it is a
characteristic feature of highly valued formal qualifications (based on attendance at elite
educational institutions, and the passing of prestigious examinations) that they promise
much more than what they formally certify. It is for this excess – this tacit certification of
the “general culture” possessed by the successful examinees, rather than their specific
technical competence – that credentials are really valued, although this is precisely what
they do not formally guarantee.
Thus, it is written into the tacit definition of the academic qualification formally
guaranteeing a specific competence (like an engineering diploma) that it really
guarantees possession of a “general culture” whose breadth is proportionate to
the prestige of the qualification; and, conversely, that no real guarantee may be
sought [...] of the extent to which it guarantees what it guarantees. This effect of
symbolic imposition is most intense in the case of the diplomas consecrating the
cultural elite. (Bourdieu 1984:25, emphasis original.) 4
Cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense consists of things attributable to taste, sensibility and
similar dispositions that are – or are supposed to be – byproducts of particular ways of
life. At one level, examinations and degrees, particularly at the elite end of the spectrum,
appear to be, and are, formal markers of achievement; however, the premium attached
to elite credentials arises from the fact that they act as proxies for ascription – they
tacitly certify “general culture”. 5
4
Bourdieu goes on to explain that: “This is by virtue of a clause which, though tacit, is firstly binding on the
qualification‐holders themselves, who are called upon really to procure the attributes assigned to them by
their status. ... This process occurs at all stages of schooling, through the manipulation of aspirations and
demands – in other words, of self‐image and self‐esteem – which the educational system carries out by
channeling pupils towards prestigious or devalued positions implying or excluding legitimate practice.”
(Bourdieu 1984:25)
5
Bourdieu also has a body of work on the academic world itself, where he comments on the examination
in various segments of the French academic establishment. (For examples, see Bourdieu 1988 and 1979.)
8
One could, of course, continue to explore various aspects of the work of these theorists,
but the following discussion is restricted to pursuing three themes in specific historical
contexts. Expressed as questions, these themes are:
How does the examination manage to mediate between modernity and tradition
by appearing to meet some of the requirements of both?
What is the relationship between examinations and merit, and between merit
and various kinds of entitlements?
If there is a ‘culture’ of examinations, and if examinations are associated with
modernity, then what does this culture tell us about modernity?
3a) The Double Dialectic: Ascription vs. Achievement, Equality vs. Inequality
Social theorists have been attracted to the phenomenon of examinations, particularly
public examinations, because they mark a significant turning point in social history. The
examination announces a major transformation in the procedures by which particular
types of power and privilege will be distributed in society, and transmitted from one
generation to the next. In terms of the functions discussed earlier, this means that
examinations represented a new way of social gatekeeping. Prior to its advent,
ascription ruled the roost – most positions of public authority and prestige were directly
inherited from blood relatives. 6 Or they were indirectly inherited, in the sense that they
could only be passed on to those born within the social groups recognised as rightful
incumbents.
The examination introduced for the first time an ‘external’ and ‘objective’ criterion for
attaining positions of public authority: external in the sense that they emerged from
outside the privileged sections of society that had traditionally inherited authority; and
objective in the sense that they invoked standards and criteria that were seen as being
the same for all potential aspirants. The associated changes in the role played by notions
of inequality and equality sometimes remained implicit, but more often they were
explicitly foregrounded. The examination as a legitimate procedure for selection could
only emerge after two changes had already happened – the first of these justified the
enlargement of the pool of potential candidates, while the second asserted the essential
equality of the members of this pool.
6
As Richard Sennett puts it: “When inheritance was the dominant fact of life for Europeans, there could be
no concept of meritocracy in the easy sense we understand, that of giving to and rewarding a person for
the job he or she does well. People inherited offices in the Church or the military just as they inherited
land. Which is to say that positions were possessions.” (Sennett 2006:107)
9
Living in the age of equality as we do today, it is easy to overlook the newness of this idea
in world history. Premodern societies in most parts of the world were predicated on
different forms of legitimised, taken‐for‐granted inequality. At the level of an ideal,
equality was a deeply illegitimate idea, just as inequality was so self‐evident as to be
considered a fact of nature. However, every age and every social system has had to deal
with the gap that separates ideals and realities, and this is what examinations also had to
do. Though they were seen as an emblematic feature of the era of equality, they had
also to compromise with the fact that much of the world, much of the time, remained
deeply unequal. As a social institution, the examination had to negotiate a compromise
between the need to offer equality of opportunity and to impartially reward merit on the
one hand, and on the other hand, the need to accommodate older structures of
inequality and hierarchy.
How did the examination manage to balance the needs of meritocracy with the need to
preserve past systems of privilege, at least partially? This question has different answers
in different contexts, but they are all related to a small number of factors. At the most
general level, the role and impact of examinations has been historically tied to three
main factors – first, the growth in the power and scope of the state and its apparatus;
second, the conditions prevailing in general education, specially the question of state
versus private schooling; and third, the growth, spread and influence of the modern
professions. Every historically specific system of examinations has had to find ways of
resolving the tension between equality and inequality as well as ascription and
achievement. Both sides of the equation have been equally important – the undeniable
break with the past in opening up access to authority and power, as well as the very real
constraints placed on this opening up. Which aspect gets more play has, not surprisingly,
depended on local circumstances.
Long recognized as the world’s oldest system of examinations that had an uninterrupted
career spanning thirteen centuries, the Chinese civil service examinations – along with
the variants they inspired in Japan, Korea and Vietnam – are a major research site for the
study of this institution. Benjamin Elman, one of the leading scholars of the Chinese
examination system (Elman 2000, 1991), summarises the main motivations for the
introduction of public examinations by the Sung dynasty in the tenth century:
Fearing repetition of the centrifugal power of regional clans and military leaders
after the reunification of China in 960, Sung emperors promulgated civil service
examinations as the measurement of talent in the empire… Northern Sung rulers
chose civil service examinations to limit the development of alternative military
and aristocratic power centers and to draw into their government the sons of
10
elites from newly emerging regions in South China. Deftly appropriating the
civilian values of Confucianism to legitimate the institution of fair and impartial
bureaucratic channels to select officials, which theoretically were open to almost
all Chinese regardless of social background, Sung emperors put in place an
examination system that would occupy a central institutional position in Chinese
government and society until 1905…. (Elman 1991:9)
However, the ‘theoretical’ openness of the examination system had to be balanced by de
facto exclusion of the vast majority, an exclusion, however, that was legitimised in
powerful ways. As he goes on to demonstrate, the examination system outgrew the
limited initial intentions of its originators to become a remarkably stable and successful
device:
Unwittingly, a brilliant piece of educational and social engineering had been
achieved. Despite shortcomings in fairness … the civil service examinations
remained the main avenue to wealth and power in late imperial China until the
nineteenth century. The homology between state officials and Confucianized
gentry that resulted disguised, through the ideology of social mobility, the de
facto elimination from officialdom of the lower classes. Chances of success in the
examinations were glorified while the prohibitive chances against entry into the
selection process were concealed. As a political, social, and cultural institution,
the educational system designed for the civil service in China served to defend
and legitimate the differentiation of Chinese society into autocratic rulers (even if
non‐Chinese in origin), Confucian gentry‐officials, and illiterate or non‐classically
literate commoners… (Elman 1991:23; see also Weber, in Gerth & Mills
1946:423‐26)
The large literature on the Chinese examinations upholds this basic picture. While there
have been debates with diametrically opposite positions being taken, the question of
whether and to what extent access to the civil services was opened up by the
examinations has never been definitively settled in favour of any one side. 7 This would
tend to underline the basic point that both the radical and democratizing aspect, as well
as the conservative and exclusionary aspect of the examinations remained relevant.
7
For example, E.A. Kracke Junior asked more than six decades ago: “Did the civil service examinations of
China’s … “Confucian state” permit the free rise of talent from non‐bureaucratic families to positions of
governmental responsibility? Or on the contrary did the body of public officials form a distinct, exclusive,
hereditary bureaucratic class?” He went on to say that “Western answers to the questions involved have
swung between two extremes…”. It is interesting to note that Kracke Junior marks the two ends of the
spectrum through the 18th century writings of Francois Quesnay (famous member of the Physiocrats, an
early school of political economists in France), and Karl Wittfogel, the German historian writing in the
middle third of the 20th century. While Quesnay credited the examination system for the fact that “There is
no hereditary nobility in China; a man’s merit and capacity alone mark the rank he is to take”, Wittfogel
tended to dismiss such claims as being mostly “popular legend”. (Kracke Jr., 1947:103‐4). However, in the
essay cited here, Kracke Junior himself leans more towards Quesnay than Wittfogel as he goes on to show,
based on newly discovered lists of Chinese officials of the 12th and 13th centuries, that more than half the
officials of those years did not have fathers or close relatives in the civil service.
11
Examinations first appeared in the West in the late 17th century, more than seven
centuries after they had been institutionalised in China. Public examinations were first
introduced for recruiting army officers, and over the next two centuries more or less the
same procedures were introduced into all the modern professions like law, medicine,
accounting, education, the civil services, and ultimately, business. 8 The history of the
western experience with examinations underlines the specificity of the Chinese case. In
China, examinations offered entry only to the civil services; in the absence of the
development of most of the other features of capitalism and modern industrial society,
they remained a precocious aberration. Moreover, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1977:143)
note, Emile Durkheim had pointed to a major difference in the Chinese case, namely that
despite their great social prestige, examinations did not lead to the development of
universities, or a permanent professoriat or professional academy. That is why the
Chinese examination had few ripple effects on the rest of society.
As Weber has noted, the Chinese examination was not in fact of the modern kind, at
least not the kind associated with the modern professions:
The Chinese examinations did not test any special skills, as do our modern
rational and bureaucratic examination regulations for jurists, medical doctors, or
technicians. Nor did the Chinese examinations test the possession of charisma, as
do the typical 'trials' of magicians and bachelor leagues.... The examinations of
China tested whether or not the candidate's mind was thoroughly steeped in
literature and whether or not he possessed the ways of thought suitable to a
cultured man and resulting from cultivation in literature. (Weber in Gerth & Mills
1946: 428‐9)
Thus, although the imperial state controlled the examinations, it made no effort to
promote education. In any case, classical learning was already the preserve of a tiny
privileged elite. The imperial state strictly controlled the syllabi for the examinations,
which emphasized Confucian moral precepts above everything else, but also permitted
esoteric and speculative essays on art, philosophy and aesthetics. Needless to say all
such subjects were inherently to the advantage of the literati, who alone could dream of
8
According to Richard Sennett, “Military organization was the domain in which the notion of careers open
to talent first made real headway… Military academies like St. Cyr, founded in the late seventeenth
century, forced young officers to learn the mathematics which enable ballistic strategy. Military academies
innovated in creating the first ability tests, a radical innovation in the eighteenth century … [that] provided
a relatively objective measure of how capable an individual would be, certainly a more objective measure
than family background or connections.” He goes on to note that, “Of course, class and cash still counted;
up to the early nineteenth century throughout Europe a wealthy individual could buy an officer’s
commission—but now the professional soldier had come into being, with the professional’s special
prestige. The same structures came in time to govern the development of other professions in civil society,
and with the same judgmental focus—law, medicine, accounting, education all eventually following the
military model. Business came last: the modern business school completes the transformation begun in St.
Cyr. (Sennett 2006:109)
12
taking the exams, even if large numbers failed repeatedly to pass them. In the words of
C.T. Hu,
In the final analysis, the true spirit of education in imperial China was the
'nurturing of scholars' known as yang‐shih. This type of education immensely
facilitated the dynastic rule, for by setting up the examination standards, the state
left almost the entire field of education in private hands while retaining control
over it at all times. Products of this form of education tended to be ultra‐
conservative, resistant to change, complacent, unwilling and unable to adjust to a
new set of world forces which began to impinge upon China in the early
nineteenth century. (Hu 1984:25)
Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Europe and Britain, it was only in the mid 19th
century that the examination became an object of enthusiasm for academia and the
state, although it had been in existence for much longer. In Western Europe, particularly
France and Germany, state investment in public education and the extensive
involvement of the state in public policy helped to spread the examination as a social
institution and to establish its prestige. In both countries the school leaving
examinations – the Abitur in Germany and the baccalauréat in France – were also
essential qualifications for government service. In Britain, state involvement in education
came much later, in the early twentieth century. Thus, scholastic examinations –
particularly the Honours exams for the Tripos at Cambridge and the Oxford Schools –
were already well established by the mid‐19th century, but examinations for recruitment
into state service came later. (Roach 1965).
In fact, the first major instance of a competitive public examination for recruitment to
public office in Britain is the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exam. Instituted in 1855 at a time
when “an old aristocracy of birth concluded an alliance with a new aristocracy of
intellect” (Dewey 1973:263), the ICS exam experience was later used to design the British
civil service exams. At the time that it was instituted, the open competitive examination
– strongly advocated by Thomas Babbington Macaulay – was intended to discontinue the
earlier reliance on patronage networks and to enable the recruitment of fresh university
graduates, particularly those from Oxford and Cambridge. The innovation was not
particularly successful in achieving its ends until the 1890s, but by then the examination
had already established itself as an institution in British society at large. 9
9
“In the first year in which the open examination was held (1855), 70 percent of the successful candidates
were Oxbridge educated and the average for the first five years was almost 60 percent. But after 1859 a
decline set in, and by 1864 only 10 percent of the ICS recruits were Oxbridge graduates.” However,
Oxbridge and other university graduates began to dominate the lists once again in the 1890s after changes
in the curriculum for the exam and an increase in the age of entry. (Dewey 1973:268‐69)
13
Apart from the obvious importance of the state, a major impetus for the popularisation
of the examination has come from the growth of the modern professions. Harold Perkin
characterises the rise of the professions as the third major social revolution in human
history after the neolithic revolution that established agriculture, and the industrial
revolution that vastly expanded manufacturing. In the post‐industrial era represented by
the professional society, examinations of various sorts are quite central since they are
essential both for credentialing and for recruitment:
Recruitment by merit is the most efficient means of meeting the need for
expertise, and so meritocracy of some sort characterizes all professional societies,
though in all of them it is skewed in favour of some candidates over others.
(Perkin 2003[1996]:11)
Today, the most prestigious and keenly competitive examinations are those that involve
professional credentialling or recruitment. In fact, it can also be argued that the growth
of the professions has itself contributed immensely to advancing and refining the
technique of the examination. Sophisticated contemporary variants of the examination
claim to measure the most elusive and minute aspects of skill, competence, and aptitude
or potential ability. (To be discussed in the next section.)
Returning to the question with which this section began, the examination managed to
meet the needs of modernity by introducing new modes of selection and certification
that were objective, egalitarian and contributed to institutional efficiency. At the same
time, exams met the needs of tradition by safeguarding the interests of the dominant
social groups, and by regulating the pace of change. The most important factors
facilitating this balancing act were the prior divisions already present in society. Since
exams were a downstream event, the elitism of upstream segments of the educational
process did much of the work of regulation by keeping out the lower classes through the
‘normal’ means of denying access to education. This was as true in ancient China as it
was in modern Germany, or is in contemporary India.
This is why Bourdieu and Passeron insist that the major burden of regulating access in
socially acceptable ways is borne by structures other than the examination itself.
In every country, the inequalities between the classes are incomparably greater
when measured by the probabilities of candidature (calculated on the basis of the
proportion of children in each social class who reach a given educational level,
after equivalent previous achievement) than when measured by the probabilities
of passing. Thus, previous performances being equal, pupils of working‐class
origin are more likely to 'eliminate themselves' from secondary education by
declining to enter it than to eliminate themselves once they have entered, and a
fortiori more likely not to enter than to be eliminated from it by the explicit
14
sanction of examination failure. Moreover, those who do not eliminate
themselves at the moment of moving from one stage to another are more likely
to enter those branches (establishments or sections) from which there is least
chance of entering the next level of education; so that when the examination
seems to eliminate them, it most often merely ratifies that other form of advance
self‐elimination which relegation to a second‐order branch, a deferred
elimination, in fact amounts to. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977:153; emphasis
original)
The gate keeping function of the examination that it seems to fulfill through the ‘pass‐
fail’ dichotomy is in fact mostly pre‐empted by ‘the silent compulsion’ of social and
economic relations that Marx spoke of.
The opposition between the 'passed' and the 'failed' is the source of a false
perspective on the educational system as a selecting agency. Based on a
candidate's experience ... this opposition between the two sub‐sets separated by
selection in the examination from within the set of candidates hides the relation
between this set and its complement (i.e. the set of non‐candidates), thereby
ruling out any inquiry into the hidden criteria of the election of those from whom
the examination ostensibly makes its selection. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977:153‐4)
3b) Examinations and Merit
If one aspect of the legitimacy of examinations derives from their claim to offer a ‘level
playing field’ to all players, another, even more crucial aspect has to do with what exams
claim to measure or identify. If the former can be called the fairness aspect, the latter is
the validity or meaningfulness aspect of examinations. Along with the third dimension of
reliability (i.e., stability across different contexts) these two aspects constitute the terrain
on which is determined the social legitimacy of the examination and, in turn, its
contributions towards legitimising the institutions within which it is deployed. Arguably,
the commanding heights of this terrain of legitimation are occupied by the question of
validity or meaningfulness of exams – what is the precise nature of the attributes or
competences they seek to identify or measure?
Recalling Max Weber’s classic typology of the three educational paradigms: those that
are designed to “awaken charisma”; those that “impart specialized expert training”; and
those that fall inbetween these two and are aimed at ”cultivating the pupil for a conduct
of life” (Weber in Gerth & Mills 1946:426), it follows that the particular kind of validity
claimed by an examination depends on the type of educational paradigm that it is part
of. These validity claims in turn give birth to – or abort – claims to entitlements of
various sorts. As Richard Sennett points out in his insightful analysis of “the culture of
15
the new capitalism”, the consequences of success or failure in tests and examinations can
be deeply asymmetrical. The linking of status to ability
sounds a new, modern note: the equation of talent with personal worth. Ability
entails a kind of moral prestige. This note is social as well as personal.
Craftsmanship fit easily within the medieval guild frame in that the apprentice as
much as the master could seek to make something well for its own sake. Now
talent measured a new sort of social inequality: creative or intelligent meant
superior to others, a more worthy sort of person. Here lay the passage from
craftsmanship to meritocracy. Modern meritocracy took shape when institutions
began to structure themselves on this sort of inequality. (Sennett 2006:108;
emphasis original)
When it works in reverse, that is, when it seeks ‘lack of talent’ rather than talent, the
modern flexible organisation undermines long established structures of employment and
work – it creates ‘the spectre of uselessness’. As Foucault pointed out, the individuation
that modern techniques of disciplinary power like the examination promote is usually
irreversible; there is no going back to the days of relative anonymity. Every individual is
illuminated in the harsh light of a hierarchical evaluation that is now required to dig
much ‘deeper’ than ever before. The new techniques
thus not only discovered talent, they objectified failure; those who were stupid
were eliminated no matter what their family background. This negative was in a
way even more important than the positive. A bureaucratic procedure now
measured something deep inside the individual, punishing him (and later her) for
lack of ability. Absolute measures of incompetence only strengthened the “merit”
of those who succeeded; an impersonal judgment determined personal worth.
(Sennett 2006:109; emphasis original)
The transition from measuring achievement to measuring ‘potential’ completed the
process of cornering the individual:
Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in character than
judgments of achievement. An achievement compounds social and economic
circumstances, fortune and chance, with self. Potential ability focuses only on the
self. The statement “you lack potential” is much more devastating than “you
messed up.” It makes a more fundamental claim about who you are. It conveys
uselessness in a more profound sense. (Sennett 2006:125)
Although Sennett’s perspective is from the leading edge of the most advanced forms of
capitalist work organisation in western society, it is useful because it helps to highlight
the counter‐intuitive trajectories of modern meritocracy. From a different vantage point
like India, one that is not quite the west even in these globalised times, but is also not
quite ‘outside’ the trends he mentions, we also need to emphasize the older features of
meritocracy that have been heightened by examinations and tests of various kinds. Two
16
of these are particularly important. First, contemporary forms of meritocracy tend to
individualise ‘merit’ or potential and to render invisible their social component. Unlike
concrete achievements, where the contributions of surrounding circumstances and other
people around the individual concerned are also visible, or harder to render invisible,
potential ability is seen as inhering in the individual alone. That the conversion of this
potential into achievement requires the necessary complement of other people’s efforts
is easy to forget. The corollary of this kind of individuation is the pre‐emptory tone in
which the entitlements of those identified by examinations and tests as possessing
potential are articulated.
A second significant feature of the tests of aptitude and ability is that they acquire an
increasingly mediated, indexical quality – that is, the content of the test and the claims
made by it tend to be widely separated. For example, when a competitive sporting event
such as a race claims to establish who is fastest among a group of runners, this ‘test’ is
not indexical because the content of the test and the nature of its claim are coterminous
– the contestants run a race, and the result establishes their respective running abilities.
By contrast, most examinations and tests have an inevitably indexical character – they
claim to measure something more than (or other than) what is established by the actual
tasks they set. Thus, for example, a candidate aspiring to join the civil service may take
an entrance exam where she appears in papers in, say, geology, philosophy and general
knowledge. On the basis of her performance in these papers, the entrance exam claims
to predict her potential ability to be a good civil servant. There is at best a rather indirect
link between being good at writing exam answers in geology, philosophy and general
knowledge and being a good civil servant. This is the sense in which the exam and the
candidate’s performance in it serves as an index – an indicator – of something else,
namely her potential to be a good civil servant.
All examinations are more or less indexical, even those that have a lot of ‘practical’
components involving activities that appear to be very close to what successful
candidates will eventually be doing professionally. All other things being equal,
indexicality tends to weaken the diagnostic claims of the examination. Because of this,
the higher the stakes, the greater the ideological energy that is spent on building up the
prestige and popular deference accorded to the exam. That is why exams guarding the
gateway to a prized profession or status are steeped in hyperbole and are socially
required (so to speak) to be traumatic bloodbaths. Anything less would not only
undermine the status of the status that they are guarding, it would also endanger the
main social function that such exams perform, which is to persuade the vast majority of
aspirants to consent to their own exclusion.
17
On the other hand, it is very difficult if not impossible to get rid of indexicality. Most
competitive examinations are compromise solutions for complex and intractable social
problems. They are rationing devices used to distribute scarce resources for which
demand greatly exceeds supply – but they must claim to be much more than just this.
They must claim to be measures of merit, for only such a claim can allow the compromise
that they enact to be ideologically persuasive and socially legitimate. The entrance exam
must secure the active consent and acquiescence of both the very large numbers
destined to fail as well as the lucky few who will pass. They must do this, moreover, in an
efficient and cost‐effective manner, while maintaining high levels of credibility, and while
supporting – or at least being broadly consistent with – existing social hierarchies and
power structures. To put it mildly, this is a very difficult task.
The reason why competitive examinations tend to be longlived is that they are easy to
criticise but very hard to replace. Alternative methods with superior claims to measuring
merit tend to be expensive in terms of money and specially in terms of highly skilled
labour and time. Where large numbers are involved, the logistics of more meaningful
tests of merit or ability are usually impossible to sustain. It is only after familiarising
oneself with the varied challenges that they must overcome that one realises why being
meaningful (in the sense of providing for the most valid test of merit) is often not the top
priority for examinations. By their very nature, examinations are subject to the
additional pressure of maintaining credibility, and for this they are required to achieve
high levels of integrity and confidentiality as well as transparency, objectivity, fairness,
repeatability and consistency.
This is not an attempt to promote pessimism but to be fair to the examination as a social
institution. We cannot expect to place strict constraints on it while simultaneously
raising expectations, and simply expect it to achieve the impossible. What we can do is
to make conscious attempts to relax the constraints – specially the material ones – and to
readjust our expectations. The greatest room for improvement is in the situations where
we force examinations to make claims that are obviously false. Arguably the worst such
situation is that of rank ordering in competitive exams. Why is it necessary to make the
utterly absurd claim that an exam, howsoever sophisticated, can measure merit at the
microscopic level of the third decimal place? Why allow the dishonest conflation of the
feasible project of measuring basic competence with the much more difficult project of
measuring excellence? Why not devise multi‐part or multi‐dimensional procedures that
address different aspects of the reality that is being faced?
18
For example, there is nothing at all that prevents from splitting the typical competitive
exam situation into two parts, one concerned with establishing broad levels of basic
competence and the other tasked with fair selection from among those identified as
possessing the necessary level of competence. The typical competitive exam claims to
measure excellence or “maximum merit”; given this claim, it has no option but to commit
itself to underwriting the sanctity of a rank ordering even within a range of scores where
the bunching is so close that ranks are meaningless. Exams are forced to do this because
they are also required to be rationing devices – the scarcity of seats relative to the
number of candidates forces a selection to be made from among a set that is basically of
equal merit, and a rank ordering offers a simple, socially acceptable solution. But what if
the selection from among equals could be explicitly recognised for what it is – a lottery?
Since the main requirement of such a selection among equals is fairness, a scientifically
conducted lottery could make the credible claim that it is the fairest possible method of
selection.
The reasons why such proposals are usually met with a strangely vehement opposition
are twofold. First, there is the purely ideological reaction provoked by the prior
investment in glorifying the exam as an authentic test of genuine merit or sheer ‘raw
talent’, another favourite phrase. The more modest, downsized claim of seeking to
establish a threshold of competence (rather than measuring maximum merit) appears as
an insult to the exalted ethical‐intellectual status of the already‐sacralised examination.
Second, there are the vested interests of those social groups who know that they are at
an advantage when it comes to scoring additional marks in an examination – marks that
have no significant meaning in terms of either intellectual capability or moral worth. It is
because rank ordering is treated as a moral‐ethical ordering that these problems arise;
and it is treated as moral‐ethical because the most vocal and resource‐rich groups in
society want to maximise their advantage over the rest of society.
Of course, as in all matters social, change is inevitable even if its timing cannot be
predicted. It is when the dominant sections of society are no longer certain of their
advantage that they begin to cut back on their ideological investment in the competitive
examination, and change begins to ‘happen’. There are indications that this may be
happening in India today, but this is the subject of a later section (Section 4b).
3c) Modernity, the Examination and Examination Cultures
Is there a ‘culture’ – that is to say, a set of shared values, clusters of practices, companion
institutions and processes, structures of feeling, common categories of experience and
19
emotion – associated with examinations? Perhaps the quickest and most persuasive way
of answering in the affirmative is to confront the reader with descriptions of ‘exam
culture’ from ancient and medieval East Asia that, despite being inevitably ‘exotic’, also
manage to sound uncannily contemporary.
For example, in China, Vietnam and Korea, public examinations were conducted at fixed
dates and venues, with thousands of candidates writing the exam simultaneously. In
China, public exams often had the appearance of modern sporting events – they were
conducted in stadium like structures, and attracted thousands of ‘supporters’ with their
own festive decorations, slogans and customary routines. Vietnamese examination
candidates wrote their papers in rows of tents in fallow paddy fields that were guarded
by elephant patrols. The Korean examination system included an array of practices
designed to ensure anonymity and transparency, including coded roll numbers and the
provision for re‐valuation. All these countries also report a familiar bunching of related
phenomena – examination stress and suicides; attempts to cheat in various ways, and
the reactive state efforts to check cheating, including death sentences for corrupt
officials and dishonest candidates; 10 ‘precocious concerns about “grade inflation”’
(Woodside 2006:8); and the celebrity status of toppers, the reflected glow of which also
shone on relatives and associates, sometimes for generations. Then as now, examination
question papers were notorious for being restricted to the most abstruse and esoteric
aspects of classical aesthetics, philosophy, or literature.
The commonality of cultural features arises from structural similarities. For example, the
very structure of the ancient civil service examinations – as indeed most competitive
examinations – was such that strenuous efforts had to be made to acquire and retain the
public’s confidence. Given that the ‘merit’ allegedly identified by the examination was
far from being self‐evident, constant ideological labour was essential to sustain the
legitimacy of the institution. As Alexander Woodside points out in his description of the
10
Here, for example, is a Chinese account: “All conceivable devices were employed to 'beat the system',
so to speak, including such common practices as huai‐chia or cribbing, mao‐k'ao or impersonation, ch'uan‐
ti or substitution and kuan‐chieh, which involved prearrangement with examiners through bribery. To
insure against these and other malpractices, the state introduced all conceivable preventive measures,
such as shou‐chien or frisking the examinees from head to toe, shun‐lo or constant patrolling of
examination halls, mi‐feng or anonymity of examinees, t'eng‐lu or copying of essays to avoid recognition
through handwriting and mo‐k'an, literally meaning the grinding re‐examination of successful essays…
Moreover, not infrequently fearfully harsh punishment was meted out to both examiners and examinees.
The case of 1658 … with near‐riot protest against corruption in that year's provincial examination in Peking
… resulted in death penalties for high‐ranking officials as well as for numerous examinees, confiscation of
personal properties and exile for untold numbers of relations of the accused… The case of 1858, also
involving the provincial examination in Peking, resulted in the death penalty for the Chief Examiner… and
for some of his subordinates… (Hu 1984:13‐14)
20
civil service exams in medieval China, Korea and Vietnam, ‘transparency’ is hardly a
modern requirement for legitimation:
The examination sites themselves became public spectacles. In China in the 1700s
the Jiangnan examination site […] accommodated more than sixteen thousand
students. […] The spectacular quality of the examinations was, in effect, an appeal
to public opinion, an advertisement […] of their claim to what would now be
called transparency. By the 1400s, for example, applicants’ answers in the Korean
civil service examinations passed through the hands of [multiple officials] …
whose tasks were to see to it that candidates’ names were concealed from their
examiners; that their answers were recopied in other people’s handwriting before
examiners saw them; and that many examiners, not one, evaluated the
candidates’ performances. Not even the examinations at contemporary Western
universities take so many transparency‐enhancing precautions. (Woodside
2006:2)
Another structurally generated commonality is the extreme stress induced by
competitive examinations and the variety of responses to this stress. The individual
impact of stress is the most poignant, with tales of suicides, insanity (or what later
generations would call ‘nervous breakdowns’), and other kinds of damage to the self
stretching across the centuries. Even today, exam suicides are a well known East and
South Asian phenomenon. Every year, the exam season brings plentiful media reports of
students committing suicide, ostensibly for reasons connected to examinations. The
largest centralised college entrance exam in the world is perhaps the Chinese gowkao
which is taken by about 10 million students every year. Held in June every year, the
exam regularly produces reports of suicide. 11 Japan is also widely perceived as being
plagued by exam suicides. But as Kangmin Zeng shows in his careful study of this
phenomenon, Japanese youth suicide rates tend to be lower than contemporary US and
European rates, and examinations are only a minor causal factor for known suicides.
There is therefore a strong possibility that media sensationalism combined with
stereotyping (both by the West and by East Asian cultures themselves) may be
responsible for this phenomenon (Zeng 199:291‐307). In this light, careful studies of
exam suicides are also needed in India to determine the degree of media exaggeration, if
any.
Across East Asian cultures, there are popular terms for exam stress. ‘Examination hell’
(shiken jigoku in Japan) is one of the most common; another popular saying is ‘Four hours
succeed, five hours fail’, referring to the number of hours students preparing for
examinations can afford to sleep (Zeng 1999:245). In every social and historical context,
11
For a recent instance of such reports, see the Hindustan Times of 9 June 2010, which features three
suicides prior to the gowkao in China. Accessed on 28 June 2010 at http://www.hindustantimes. com/
Three‐students‐end‐life‐ahead‐of‐Chinese‐college‐exam/Article1‐555235.aspx.
21
the competitive examination seems to produce not only its triumphant victors – who by
definition are few – but also a much wider swathe of its ‘losers’, in the broad American
sense of the word. The ‘exam failure’ is a common social type from tenth century
imperial China to contemporary India. In contemporary Japan, those who fail in the
school leaving or university entrance exams are called ‘ronin’ – a term from medieval
times that referred to samurai without masters, warriors who had lost honour and were
of degraded status. In a typical academic year, there are likely to be more than 200,000
ronin preparing desperately to re‐take the exam. In Taiwan, the colloquial term is
‘Chongkao zu’, or ‘tribe of repeaters’ (Zeng 1999:173).
An interesting dimension of this stress – and the knowledge that failure is far more likely
than success – is the universal reliance on ‘magic’ of various kinds. Ranging from
straightforward attempts to secure divine help through religious channels to the
harnessing of more secular attempts to magically influence fate, the use of ‘magic’ is
found wherever competitive exams are found. In fact Kangming Zeng goes so far as to
speak of the ‘de‐secularization’ of the examination in East Asia (Zeng 1999, Ch.6, “With
help from the gods…”). Familiar as we are with ‘Eastern’ religious‐practical magic or
superstition (whether ancient or modern), it may be useful in this context to look at
contemporary Western instances of it in order to appreciate its structural character. A
wide variety of ‘luck‐bringing’ or ‘bad‐luck‐averting’ charms, totems, ritual practices and
actions are recruited to deal with exam stress, as this account from a Canadian university
context in the late 1980s attests:
The examination arena is one in which students, no matter how well prepared,
encounter a number of uncertainties. These include, for example, whether they
have interpreted the questions correctly; whether the professors will interpret
their answers as they intend them; and not least, whether they themselves are
"up" for the contest in terms of the sharpness of their memories, organizational
abilities, and ability to complete the task on time. Accordingly, it is not surprising
to find surrounding the examination a number of practices by students that are
clearly intended as uncertainty‐coping mechanisms and which could be called
magic, if magic is defined as an action directed toward the achievement of a
particular outcome with no logical relationships between the action and the
outcome or, indeed, any empirical evidence that the one produces the other. In
effect, this is nonrational behavior in a setting where one might expect maximum
rationality. (Albas and Albas 1989:603‐4)
But easily the most visible and enduring structurally generated response to the
competitive examination is the ‘coaching industry’. In every context from ancient China
onwards, public competitive exams have spawned a large and extremely powerful
establishment designed to help students prepare for (and hopefully pass) the exams.
While it is possible that the same could have been true in the past as well, it is certainly
22
the case that the parallel educational system that comes up to deal with competitive
exams typically tends to be comparable in size or (as is widely speculated in the Indian
case) even larger than the formal set up. A whole range of ‘cramming’ classes exist to
cater to every segment of the market, usually exercising a lot of indirect and sometimes
direct influence on the official sector. Family and clan‐run institutions emerged in
medieval China, where the state kept out of the educational sector, even though it
strictly controlled the examinations. A large and flourishing ‘cramming’ industry swiftly
followed the growing popularity of the examination in mid‐19th century England, helping
to prepare students for the Oxbridge entrance and scholarship exams as well as the
Indian Civil Service exams and later the British civil service exams.
In contemporary times, it would seem that East Asia is the global powerhouse in the
cramming industry, followed by India and South Asia more generally. Coaching centres
for training students to take competitive public examinations (school leaving as well as
university entrance) are known as hakwon in Korea; buxiban in Taiwan; and juko or
yobiko in Japan. Korea appears to be the largest market – it has the highest expenditures
on private educational tuitions among all OECD countries. According to one estimate,
the total private education costs incurred by South Koreans in 2004 amounted to 13.65
trillion won (or roughly US$ 13 billion!). Similar estimates for Japan and Taiwan for an
earlier decade put the size of the juko market in Japan at US$ 11.7 billion, while the
buxiban of Taiwan were a US$ 212 million industry in 1991. 12 There are as yet no
authoritative estimates for India, but one recent guesstimate by the Associated
Chambers of Commerce (ASSOCHAM) values the IIT Joint Entrance Examination coaching
industry alone at around Rs.10,000 crores, or a little over US$ 2 billion. 13
Of course, the kind of intensive cramming that adolescents are subjected to is not just a
matter of an industry and its monetary value. Cram culture – most deeply entrenched,
perhaps, in Japan and South Korea, but quite pervasive all over East and South Asia –
completely dominates daily life not just for the student but the entire family. The
financial burden of coaching classes is considerable and can be as much as a third or
more of the family income, not counting borrowings. 14 Apart from money, a
12
The Korean estimate is by the Korean Educational Development Institute and is cited in Card 2005; it is
interesting to note that about a third of this total expenditure is specifically for learning English. The Japan
and Taiwan estimates are from Zeng 1999:152‐3; the Taiwan figure refers to the total earnings of the
buxiban rather than total expenditures of households. These figures are being mentioned here for purely
illustrative purposes; obviously the statistical details involved need to be addressed for a more elaborate
discussion of the relative size of the cram sectors of various economies.
13
As cited in many press reports, including the Times of India of 3rd July, 2008; believed to be too high.
14
According to Card (2005), “The costs are brutal for most middle‐class Koreans, with an average of
US$700‐$1,000 a month going to tutoring and cram school lessons.” Zeng (1999:165) estimates costs at
one buxiban at about $1788 for a six month course, or about US$300 per month.
23
considerable amount of time has to be invested, with at least one family member, usually
the mother, devoting herself full time to ‘managing’ the examination candidate. 15 The
daily routines of exam aspirants commonly stretch from early morning, say six am right
up to midnight. This is because the coaching classes are conducted before and after
normal school hours (except for the ‘ronin’ or repeaters, who often don’t have to attend
school and can attend coaching classes full time.) Coaching is also where gender
inequalities assert themselves very strongly. In every country where competitive
examinations are an important part of life today, it is boys who dominate. Expectations
from the girls are different, and financial constraints also have a role to play. 16 Although
this is now beginning to change as women are increasingly able to pursue almost as wide
a range of careers as men, and are also beginning to gain social acceptance as
‘breadwinners’, the fact remains that the world of cramming and coaching classes is
overwhelmingly male.
However, the larger question about the shared culture of examinations is about its
significance. What can we learn from the fact that societies far removed from each other
in time and space, and with very different historical trajectories, nevertheless shared a
broadly similar examination culture? Perhaps the most ambitious response is that of
Alexander Woodside, who argues that the social history of the examination ought to
compel us to rethink the very notion of modernity (Woodside 2006. Until otherwise
indicated, subsequent page references are to this text.)
Acknowledging that ‘the term “modern” was fatally compromised by its provincialism
right from the outset’ (p.3‐4), Woodside suggests that
the rationalization processes we think of as “modern” are more manifold than is
often assumed. They may occur independently of one another, as a multiplicity of
developments, in some instances quite separately from such obvious landmarks
as the growth of capitalism or industrialization. (p.1)
If one of the hallmarks of modernity is the ‘development of recognizably postfeudal
forms of reasoning’ along with the ‘powers of critical self‐awareness that might
accompany them’ , then the supposedly pre‐modern discussions of bureaucracy in East
Asia are far ahead of a thinker like Max Weber, who in traditional East Asian terms would
be considered a ‘mountain and forest’ – i.e., a provincial – scholar (p33). If the East was
15
“As authors have literary agents for scheduling book signings and musicians have agents who book
concerts and appearances, a new generation of South Korean mothers has taken the role of educational
agent for their child. They micro‐manage every hour that could be spent studying, whether a weekend or
holiday. It is common to study outside of the home past midnight. Students have come to loathe winter
and summer vacations where they are enrolled in "intensive" gulag‐like study programs.” (Card 2005).
16
Gender discrimination is particularly severe for the ‘ronin’ or repeaters; boys are pressurised into trying
again after initial failure at the exams, but girls are not. (Zeng 1999:252).
24
undeniably ‘non‐modern’ in many ways, so too was the West; an unprejudiced eye would
today recognize a mix of the modern and the un‐modern in both societies. As such, the
twelve centuries’ worth of critical insider controversies in the great ‘Chinese debate
about meritocracy—the administrative version of the great Kantian problem of the need
to make people who are morally fallible our rulers’ (p.33), and the ‘precocious limited
defeudalization of the three Asian polities that had examination systems’ (p.5) must be
treated not as an aberrant episode in the non‐modern history of non‐western peoples,
but in fact as ‘part of the history of human reason, of the attempt to apply supposedly
rational thought to politics and economics’ (p.5).
Carrying this argument to its logical end, Woodside suggests that the social history of the
examination provides strong grounds for breaking with Eurocentric notions of modernity,
thus paving the way for the recognition that
The modern, comprehensively understood, surely has multiple sources, in the
east Asian mandarinates as well as elsewhere. […] East Asian traditions of the
political uses of human reason, and the theorizations of risks associated with
those uses, are well worth studying in their own right, by anyone who lives on the
side of a volcano, as we all do. And a fuller recovery of the multiple sources of the
modern that have been lost will only make the West’s invention of steam engines
and stock markets more, not less, historically fascinating. (Woodside 2006:115)
4. Aspects of the Examination in Contemporary Indian Society
Informed by this brief foray into the history of the examination as a social institution,
what insights can we bring to bear on examinations contemporary in India? At the
outset, we need to distinguish between two broad types of examinations. These types
run parallel to the distinction made between the social and scholastic functions of
examinations. One type, is of course the competitive public examination as an ‘entrance’
exam, providing access to some desirable status, resource or position. For obvious
reasons, it is this type that is historically prominent. However, modern governance has
also created the notion of ‘general education’, that is considered to be a social good even
if it brings no specific entitlements or benefits to individuals. This is the sense in which a
more literate and, by extension, a more educated society is better than one less so.
Hence there are examinations within the education system itself that fulfill various
pedagogical and disciplinary purposes. These are sometimes referred to as ‘exit’ exams,
in part to distinguish them from the ‘entrance’ exams, but also because they often
regulate movement from one stage of educational achievement to another. 17 Not
17
For a brief discussion of the different logics of ‘exit’ versus ‘entrance’ exams, see NCERT 2006:1‐2.
25
surprisingly, the logic governing these two kinds of examinations is very different and
must therefore be considered separately.
4a) ‘Exit’ Examinations in Indian Education
Traditionally, the pupil’s progress through the educational system is punctuated by
periodic examinations. Each such examination has no other function – or bestows no
other entitlement – than to enable entry into the next level or class in the system.
Except at significant turning points along this journey (like class X or class XII), such
examinations are subject to local rather than broader social pressures. In other words,
most exit examinations tend to be more scholastic than social.
The conventional functions associated with such examinations are those discussed
earlier, namely pedagogic diagnosis, standardisation, and accountability of the system.
Thus passing the year end examination for class VI, for example, could be said to signal
the following: a) that the pupil has mastered the curricular content prescribed for class
VI at normal levels of competence, and thus fit to proceed further; and b) that the
teachers and the school concerned have done their jobs in teaching the prescribed
syllabus for class VI. In the early days of the welfare state and before the broadening of
democracy, these examinations also tended to function as socio‐cultural filters weeding
out or slowing down pupils from particular social groups and classes. Failure in
examination was a common reason for discontinuing education and was part of the
larger structure of dispositions that Bourdieu calls the habitus. This habitus enabled
what he terms ‘the choice of the necessary’. 18 Examinations ‘enabled’ (if that is the
term) different social groups to acquire the kinds and amounts of education that was
considered appropriate for their station in life. They provided a concrete, individualised
trigger for a ‘choice’ – to drop out – that was, in fact, not a choice at all. However, more
recently, the examination seems have receded in importance as a trigger for dropouts.
As is well known, school systems in most societies function like a giant funnel, like the
one shown in Figure 1 below for India circa 2005‐06. The first years of primary education
begin with a broad base of enrolment, which is constantly eroded at every subsequent
stage until we end up with a narrow wedge at the higher education or college level.
18
This phrase is the title of Ch.7 in Bourdieu 1984:372ff. See also Ch.3, “Structures, Habitus, Practices”, in
Bourdieu 1990:52‐65.
26
Figure 1: THE FUNNEL OF EDUCATION IN INDIA, 2005‐2006
The length of each rectangle is proportionate to the Gross Enrolment Ratio
PRIMARY SCHOOL Classes I—V Age 6—11
Gross Enrolment Ratio = 109.4 %
SECONDARY SCHOOL Classes VI—VIII
Age 11—14 Gross Enrolment Ratio = 71.0 %
HIGHER SECONDARY
Classes IX—XII, Age 14—18
GER = 40.4 %
College
18‐23
GER=
11.6 %
Data Source: Table 9: Gross Enrolment Ratios, in Educational Statistics at a Glance, 2005‐06, Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India, New Delhi 2008, p.8.
One reason to suppose that the role of the examination as a gatekeeping device is no
longer as important as it used to be is the fact that, broadly speaking, failure rates have
fallen below the level of the dropout rates. In other words, the number and proportion
of those who fail exams is usually much smaller than the number and proportion of those
who dropout. For example, taking the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class
XII examination as our universe, we find that in the 2010 exam, the percentage of all
candidates who passed was 79.87%, a little over one percentage point less than the pass
percentage for 2009, which was 81%. Let us assume that the pass percentage in the
various state secondary education boards will be less than the CBSE rate, say 70%, which
is a reasonably good guess at the overall average. 19 This pass percentage means that
19
This needs a proper study of its own, something which is beyond the scope of this lecture. But a quick
survey of results for 2010 (for Class XII, unless otherwise indicated) confirms this impression – Rajasthan
73.54%; Orissa 71.74%; Uttar Pradesh 70.70%; Bihar (inter‐Science) 92.51%; and so on. (Figures accessed
from the respective State Boards of Secondary Education, or newspaper reports). For 2005‐06, the most
recent year for which comprehensive statistics seem to be available, MHRD 2008a gives a weighted
average pass percentage for the Class XII exam across 32 Boards from 28 states as 72.71% (Table 15,
Results of Higher Secondary Examination 2006, A: All Categories).
27
only 30% fail at the Class XII level. However, Figure 1 tells us that although about 40% of
the relevant age group are enrolled in Classes IX to XII, this enrolment ratio comes down
to under 12% at the college level. But with an average pass percentage of 70% at the
Class XII level, the proportion of those eligible to go on to college would be roughly 70%
of 40%, or about 28% of the relevant age group. 20 But the actual proportion enrolled at
the college level is under 12% or less than half of the eligible proportion, roughly
speaking.
It is important to emphasize that, at this stage, this is a purely statistical argument that
allows us to remain agnostic about the question of whether the quality of education has
in fact improved over time. The numbers show that there has been an upward pressure
on the pass percentage, whereas the dropout rate has been much slower to respond.
Why has this happened? We could speculate along the following lines: With the
broadening of democracy based on the logic of numbers, previously powerless groups
acquire voice. Failure rates become a politically sensitive statistic. At the same time, a
vastly expanded and overstretched educational bureaucracy seeks to resist and
circumvent the pressures that it faces. Finally, despite having acquired political salience,
subaltern social groups lack the detailed knowledge and inherited social capital to
accurately monitor the quality of education that their children receive. This makes it
possible for the state educational system to evade its responsibility to provide quality
education, thus paving the way for a purely statistical increase in the pass rate, an
outcome that suits all parties in the short run. 21
It is therefore hardly surprising that the net result of all these pressures and counter
pressures is to ‘soften’ the role of the exam as a gatekeeping device. 22 The proportion of
pupils passing examinations has risen steadily, as postcolonial realities replace colonial
ones. There has also been pressure from educationists to reduce the scholastic role of
examinations in favour of more pupil friendly and pedagogically sophisticated methods.
Now that many school boards are in fact doing away with most such exams, newer
methods are coming into play. It is as yet unclear whether abolishing examinations in
favour of ‘continuous and comprehensive evaluation’ (CCE) as has been done by the
20
Of course, this assumes that the two age groups (for the Class XII and for College) are roughly the same
size – this is not an unreasonable assumption for the kind of broad generalisation being made here. A
more careful statistical study is needed to establish this point beyond doubt.
21
As Geeta Gandhi Kingdon has shown in the case of Uttar Pradesh, pass percentages plunged from 57% in
1991 to 14.7% in 1992 because of stricter policing of the exam and the consequent curbing of ‘mass‐
cheating’ otherwise commonly associated with the exam. (Kingdon 2007:15‐16).
22
This is in contrast to East Asia, where public competitive exams for exiting from primary to middle and
middle to secondary schooling are still quite ‘hard’ and continue to bear the primary burden of
gatekeeping.
28
CBSE 23 will achieve its stated objectives, namely to reduce pressure on students, to
improve pedagogies, and to encourage more accurate and enabling student evaluations.
However, countervailing tendencies are still around, with proposals for instituting new
public examinations being taken up by some state governments, mainly with the motive
of enforcing accountability of the education bureaucracy. 24
In looking at the social role of scholastic examinations, we must not forget the
democratic promise that they hold out. As such, they are part of a larger social process
of selection in which they play both an exclusionary and an inclusionary part. In the
Indian case in particular, they seemed to have played more of an inclusionary part,
specially since the exclusionary duties were taken over by other elements of the social
system. As Krishna Kumar has pointed out a quarter century ago, ‘early selection’ and
‘mass examination’ are the two complementary poles of a dialectic through which the
educational system fulfills its social role in post‐colonial India:
Whereas the strategy of early selection practised by the private education system
continues to offer safe routes towards status professions to the children of the elite,
mass examination offers to the rest of society the assurance that status can also be
achieved through competition. Thus, while early selection is a 'reproductionist' force
in Indian education, mass examination is a symbol of the possibility of change.
(Kumar 1985:1281)
But the possibility of change remained an unfulfilled promise; indeed, it was
systematically sabotaged by the rapid segregation of schooling in the post‐independence
decades:
By maintaining a separate system of schooling on the basis of early selection, the
urban elite pre‐empted the development of a truly mass education system. The
system of holding mass examinations did act as a symbolic corrective to a certain
extent, but it could not prove sufficiently effective in upholding the myth of open
competition and equal opportunity. Early selection impeded the erosion of
ascription‐based differentiation and also the emergence of an achievement‐based
differentiation in school and society. (Kumar 1985:1282)
However, while ‘early selection’ into private schooling continues to be the norm today,
and while it is undoubtedly at the heart of the inequities that mark Indian education,
there is one change that makes the 2000s very different from the 1970s or 1980s. This is
the fact that now, private education is no longer the preserve of the elite or the middle
classes – a wide segment of the non‐affluent and even some sections of the poor seem to
be relying on it. Thus, the private‐public divide in school education no longer maps in any
simple way to the class structure, except for the fact that, in urban India at any rate,
23
See the CBSE Circular 39 of 20‐09‐2009, available at the official website http://www.cbse.nic.in/
24
For example, Maharashtra has proposed a new exam at the class IV level to check on the efficacy of
primary education in the state. See J.V.Deshpande 2002.
29
reliance on state schooling is a sure indicator of poverty or constraint. Both private
education and the privatisation of education are now much more complex issues than
they were in the past, and they are also somewhat to the side of my main concern in this
lecture, which is examinations.
Of course, gatekeeping is not the only function that exit examinations have performed –
they have long been entrusted with important scholastic or pedagogical functions as
well. However the literature on this aspect of the educational system – known by the
traditional name of ‘examination reform’ – makes for depressing reading. From the
Report of the Committee on Examinations appointed in 1970 (NCERT 1971), through to
the 2005 Position Paper of the National Focus Group on Examination Reforms (NCERT
2006), the same concerns reappear in every report or study. 25 Poor question quality;
invitation to memorisation and rote learning; problems of subjectivity or other forms of
unreliability in marking; incentives for selective study and teaching; excessive reliance on
a single type of written test, usually consisting of ‘essay type’ questions; problems with
interpretation of exam marks – these are some of the perennial worries of examination
reform. The fact that, despite having been identified early, these problems have
persisted for four decades is a discouraging indicator of the formidable inertia generated
by the status quo and the difficulty of changing things.
However, there is no doubt that the 2005 Position Paper of the NCERT’s National Focus
Group on Examination Reform has set a new benchmark in stating the problems
associated with exit examinations in India, regardless of our success in solving them.
This succinct, admirably clear and elegantly written document is a must read for anyone
interested in examinations. The Position Paper begins with the reasons why reform is
needed, and why ‘exit’ and ‘entrance’ exams must not be confused with each other, and
goes on to provide a summary diagnosis of the ills besetting the institution and possible
remedies to be tried. Constructive engagement with the Position Paper is surely going to
be the obvious starting point for debates on, and efforts towards, reform in the near
future. As someone who is a recent entrant to this field, I only have two caveats to offer
by way of engagement with this refreshing document, one major and one minor.
The major caveat concerns the discussion of “The Learning Imperatives of the New
Knowledge Societies” (Section 2.1, NCERT 2006:3‐5). I think that the Position Paper is
much too uncritical in its endorsement of these imperatives – we need to ask whether
25
See also UNESCO 1978; Krishna Kumar 2005, 2009; and Deshpande 2002 for examinations at the school
level; and Momin 1974, Zachariah 1993, Deshpande 2004 and Venkatraman 2007 for exams at the college
and university level.
30
the education system must also resist these imperatives, at least in part. Here we would
do well to recall Richard Sennett’s cautions about the ‘new economy’ discussed earlier
(Sennett 2006, sp. Ch.2, ‘Talent and the Spectre of Uselessness’). Sennett warns us that
‘flexibility’ is the pleasant face of the two sided phenomenon called the ‘knowledge
economy’, whose ugly face is the ‘spectre of uselessness’. There is something to be said
for designing an educational system – and its examinations – in such a way that they
preserve some of the vanishing values of craftsmanship even as they adapt, inevitably, to
the needs of the new economy. This is a caveat because I do not dispute the need to
address the prevailing economic climate; I do wish, however, that the Position Paper had
retained some critical distance while doing so. 26
My minor caveat is really a worry about insufficient emphasis. The Position Paper
outlines explicitly and implicitly the many reasons why things are the way they are with
examinations. However, I believe that these reasons deserve to be highlighted to a much
greater degree. For only then will we fully appreciate the nature and strength of the
opposition that examination reform instantly conjures up – and that too in an apparently
‘natural’ and effortless manner. For example, we need to have a stronger sense of the
unanimous support received by the ‘short answer’ factual question which the Position
Paper rightly reviles. A question which requires a specific and limited portion of a specific
textbook to be reproduced is by far the most popular exam question in schools. Teachers
in all types of schools love them, students prefer them, and parents appreciate them – all
because they are clear, unambiguous, limited, do‐able and monitor‐able. In short, they
reduce uncertainty for all the concerned parties. 27 It is only through personal
involvement with the exam process that I have come to realise how real and important
this benefit is to the people involved.
Attempts at examination reform in the past have been handicapped by the fact that, for
understandable reasons, they have been almost exclusively top down campaigns. In
order to encourage complementary ‘bottom‐up’ efforts – or at least to reduce subaltern
resistance – reformists will have to seriously address the issue of uncertainty. This is a
genuine concern and should not be confused with many others that are also at work,
such as vested interests of various sorts and the sheer inertia of large bureaucracies.
Exam questions are but one site where such empathetic understanding will have to be
cultivated. The Position Paper is certainly aware of this and other sites, but further
26
It is noteworthy that the Position Paper’s recommendation for eliminating the term ‘fail’ from
examination results combines a humane perspective with solid arguments in its defence; in a parallel way,
Sennett’s work points out precisely what is unjust about the notion of failure in the world of flexible skills.
27
Recall the reasons why the pressure of uncertainty often provokes recourse to ‘magic’ in the context of
exams, as discussed in section 3c above.
31
movement in this resistant medium would be facilitated by foregrounding the ‘good’ (as
different from the ‘bad’ or illusory) reasons why reform is opposed.
4b) The ‘Entrance’ Examination in India: Competitive Measures of Merit
If the exit examination, which certifies the successful acquisition of the skills and
knowledge defined by a particular curriculum, can be considered a universal right, it is
because such a credential does not offer any immediate or specific entitlements. While it
may be good for society to have more of its citizens acquire such credentials, and while
the credential holders themselves may be in general terms ‘better off’ holding them, this
well‐being remains abstract and diffuse. In other words, only those credentials are
treated as universal rights which, even if they are necessary conditions for acquiring
social status and economic security, are so far from being sufficient that they are virtually
irrelevant. By contrast, the entrance examination – or any examination that functions as
one – guards the gateway to tangible, coveted and scarce resources. As such, it is by its
very nature exclusive and therefore subject to an entirely different logic. (This section
extends the general considerations on exams as measures of merit – discussed in section
3b above – to the Indian case.)
Where the exit exam tends to loosen over time, the overwhelming pressure on the
entrance exam is to remain tight or restrictive. The most obvious evidence of this is to be
found in the ‘pass percentages’ or proportion of successful candidates. The best known
entrance examinations in the country are those conducted by the Union Public Service
Commission (UPSC) for various civil service posts; and the Joint Entrance Examination
(JEE) for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and sister institutions. These are mass
examinations by any standard. The UPSC data show that total applicants for all services
(including defence services) have been around one million between 2006 and 2009, with
around half this number actually completing the examination process. The number of
such candidates (in thousands) stood at 607, 595, and 458 respectively for 2006‐7, 2007‐
8 and 2008‐9. For applications processed through the year 2006, the applicants‐to‐posts
ratio for 2006 was 722, while that for 2007 was 458 (UPSC 2009:9‐10). The IIT‐JEE is on a
scale comparable to that of the UPSC if the number of appeared candidates is taken.
455,571 candidates appeared for the 2010 edition of the JEE, of which 12,676 were
offered admission to the IITs or its sister institutions. 28 This makes for a ‘pass
percentage’ of 2.78% which is slightly higher than the 2.6% for 2009. To take another
popular example, the examination for being certified as a Chartered Accountant
28
As reported in the Times of India, 8th June, 2010.
32
conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has, between May
2007 and June 2009, seen its pass percentage range between 7.86% and 28.26%. While
this is significantly higher than the JEE pass percentage, the ICAI exam is on an entirely
different scale, being taken by roughly 50,000 candidates annually. However, all three
examinations have pass percentages or success rates that would be simply unsustainable
for an exit examination, where, as we have seen above, pass percentages are in the 70‐
90% range.
The social, political and scholastic reasons or factors which allow such low rates of entry
to be sustained have been discussed earlier (in Section 3b). In part, these dramatically
low proportions are an artefact of the very status of the examination itself, because that
is what attracts a large number of aspirants who have no realistic chance of being
anywhere near the cut‐off mark. This is brought out most starkly in the JEE where the
average mark in 2009 was 29 out of 489, whereas the cut‐off mark stood at 178. 29 It is
thus the prestige of the examination that tautologically reaffirms itself by attracting a
large number of candidates who are essentially cannon fodder and contribute to the aura
of selectivity that surrounds the examination. Clearly, this aura is a self‐sustaining
phenomenon.
An important aspect of such examinations and their conceptual‐ideological structure is
the inevitable conflation that they enact between eligibility or competence and
excellence or ‘raw talent’. The ideological image of the IITs and hence of the JEE is that
of the highest reaches of excellence in scientific and technical fields. This invokes the
need to recruit the very best who can push back the frontiers of knowledge at these
rarefied heights. However, in practice very few JEE‐qualified candidates go for pure
research or advanced study; the IITs are coveted mainly because they are a gateway to
global corporate employment. Moreover, the IITs or other elite institutions of that sort
are also meant to be educational institutions – that is, they are supposed to teach and
train. The logic of a teaching institution suggests that in the entrance criteria prescribed
for prospective students, eligibility or competence should be at least as important as
excellence. The opposite is in fact the rule, as is clear from the structure of the JEE,
which acquires the attributes of the individualised aptitude test of potential ability
discussed earlier. The examination thus claims to test not current competence but future
potential and that, too, for something that is empirically never a significant choice of
successful candidates, namely advanced research. Even if one thinks of the JEE as testing
29
The average seems to have increased substantially in 2010 – it was at 55 (compared to 28 in 2009), even
though the cutoff mark only increased to 190 (compared to 178 in 2009). While there is no authoritative
reason given for this sudden rise, there has been widespread speculation that this was caused by attempts
to repair the damage due to certain errors in one of the question papers.
33
for basic aptitude for engineering itself (rather than advanced research), such a claim has
to be based on scientific studies and empirical evidence. It is specially ironic that in the
IITs of all places, such evidence is not systematically collected or made public.
The one study at IIT Madras that did get reported in the press in fact showed the
opposite – namely, that there was no strong correlation between the All India Rank
obtained by a student in the JEE and his/her subsequent Cumulative Grade‐Point Average
in the IIT coursework. Indeed, the study found that the class XII mark was a much better
predictor of CGPA at IIT than the JEE, which was also poorly correlated with the school
results (i.e., those with good performance in JEE did relatively badly in the school exams
and vice versa). 30
Examinations that face such heavy pressure as the JEE does, are forced to conflate
eligibility with excellence because of the gatekeeping function they have to perform.
This involves turning a blind eye to the obvious logical fallacies, exaggerations, and
misleading implications that they routinely propagate. The conception of excellence or
‘selecting the very best’ rests on the minute rank ordering that the examination forcibly
produces. With the cut‐off point being determined by the number of places available to
be filled – a variable clearly bereft of any intellectual content – the all or nothing
dichotomy that it represents cannot be justified. For example, in the 2009 edition of the
JEE, the 501st rank had an aggregate mark of 302 (out of 489), while the 5,501st rank had
an aggregate of exactly 200 marks. Thus, as many as 5000 ranks were ‘stuffed’ into a
mere 102 mark range, making for about 50 candidates per mark, or conversely, an
average difference of 0.02 marks per candidate. As one would expect, the ‘crowding’ of
ranks increases as we go lower down the distribution towards the cutoff mark. Thus,
between rank 5,501 at 200 marks and the last general category candidate to be selected,
whose rank was 8,295 and score 178, there are 2,794 ranks compressed into a mere 22
mark range, or 127 candidates per mark. Simulation studies, such as the one by
Srivastava and Mahajan (2008), show that chance plays a considerable role in
determining rank in examinations such as the JEE. A different test of comparable
difficulty is likely to produce major changes in the rankings of the same candidates.
These features of intensely competitive entrance exams are hardly unknown. Indeed,
they have been the subject of debate within the IITs themselves. 31 Why, then, do they
30
As reported in the Indian Express of 17th October, 2005, accessed at http://www.indianexpress.com/res
/web/pIe/full_story.php?content_id=80171. The study was conducted by Prof. Idy Chandy of IIT Chennai
and included data from all the IITs. I am grateful to Prof. T.A. Abinandanan of the Indian Institute of
Science for the link to this report.
31
For an excellent example, see the eloquent essay by B.N. Banerjee (Banerjee 2000) in the September‐
November 2000 issue of Directions, (which appears to be an IIT Kanpur inhouse e‐journal) devoted to
engineering education and specially the JEE. There have also been many other discussions on the net.
34
continue to retain their ideological potency? Or to look at it from the opposite direction,
why is there such strong opposition to explicitly introducing chance or luck into the
process through something like a lottery among all those above a more meaningful cut‐
off point than that arbitrarily decided by the number of places available? The answer has
to be sought in the ideological functions of such examinations. Since their main job is to
enact a socially legitimate and consensual mode of distributing very scarce opportunities
and resources, they must perforce invoke notions of excellence. Indeed, it would be
sacrilegious for them to admit what everyone knows to be the plain truth, namely that,
once basic levels of competence are assured, a large element of chance and arbitrariness
marks the actual selection of candidates. But one reason why exams like the JEE invite
such heavy ideological investment is because they happen to be located in a society
marked by longstanding inequalities, specially in access to higher education. It is in the
context of reservation policies that the ideological weaponry at the disposal of the
competitive public exam is unleashed. The potency of the idea of merit and its links to
the competitive examination were revealed in full measure in 2006‐7 after the 93rd
Amendment mandated the expansion of OBC reservations to the elite institutions of
higher and professional education like the IITs and IIMs. 32
Given this context, it has been both instructive and interesting to see the recent
rethinking that has been going on around the JEE. As recently as June 2010, for example,
a panel set up to recommend reforms announced that dramatic changes would be
brought about in the examination. 33 It is to be renamed an ‘aptitude test’ and will have
much less weightage (30%) with the bulk of the weightage being given to the good old
school leaving examination. This in effect reverses the status quo between these two
examinations. Of course the move is proving controversial and is being debated
vociferously. But the more interesting question to ask is about the reasons that have
prompted such drastic reforms. Newspaper reports suggest that there has been
increasing dissatisfaction with the JEE because its ‘owners’, namely the IIT managements,
feel that it has not been doing its job well enough. From one perspective, it is failing to
capture ‘raw talent’, and has succumbed to the sustained onslaught of specialised
training centres that drill students into producing successful performances. In Bourdieu’s
terms discussed earlier, the exam is proving unable to distinguish between what
candidates are from what they have learnt to do. Raw talent, like Weber’s charisma, is
supposed to be an innate characteristic that cannot be acquired through training. With a
wide variety of cramming centres flaunting their success rates, the claims of the JEE have
32
For recent discussions on the idea of merit and its place in an unequal society like India, see Deshpande
2006 & 2009, and Madan 2007.
33
As reported in the Times of India, 24th June, 2010. Similar reports have been aired in the press since April
2010, but this report is about the recommendation of the panel that was set up in April.
35
appeared more and more hollow. The welcome JEE reform is at least in part a reaction
against these onslaughts of the market on previously sacrosanct markers of distinction.
While they are part of a somewhat different, rather more overtly politicised, context than
the IIT‐JEE, the UPSC examinations (or their predecessors) have also been debated
intermittently right from the colonial times. 34 An interesting recent development with
multiple ramifications is the increasing salience of Indian languages, mainly Hindi, in the
civil service exams (Tangirala 2009). The upshot of the debates on the link between
competitive examinations and the elusive concept of merit is that questions of
identification and measurement form only the beginning and middle of the story – they
remain far from being the last word. No matter what the provisional consensus arrived
at on these questions, other questions will remain unanswered primarily because, in the
foreseeable future, the concept of merit is destined to be under‐determined by the types
of evidence offered as proof, most notably rank in a competitive examination.
The most important of these unanswered questions is perhaps the one raised by Amartya
Sen regarding what he terms the “force” of merit (Sen 2000). Once we have identified
and measured merit (by whatever method), what consequences should legitimately
follow from this? Most perspectives on merit have been either deliberately or
unknowingly self‐serving in evading this important question. The most common
response – which remains implicit rather than explicit – is to take for granted a ‘winner
takes all’ logic. That is, whoever ‘wins’ the battle of merit gets everything, the loser(s)
get nothing. If we agree, as we are forced to by the preceding discussion, that merit
remains underdetermined by the evidence, then it is hard to justify such a strategy. It
seems obvious that a more nuanced and calibrated approach is needed to do justice to
the various types of fairness that have to be respected. Thus, the overall direction of the
thinking in this area is towards multiple methods of testing and identification, and a
balance between different criteria. It is precisely such a compromise that affirmative
action programmes suggest, and this in turn, is precisely what those with a vested
interest in inflated notions of merit vehemently oppose.
In sum, it would seem that, in a society as deeply unequal as India, ‘entrance’
examinations as competitive measures of merit are destined to become more modest in
their claims. This will come about not because competitive examinations will become
more magnanimous, but because they will discover that they have much to be modest
about.
34
The recent phase of this debate, which is concerned with the transition from a colonial to a post‐colonial
regime, can perhaps be signposted by Kumar 1985, Shukla 1996 and Tangirala 2010.
36
5. In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Future of “Examination Reform”
As Sigmund Freud pointed out more than a century ago, the examination has long been
an important psychological site for enacting stress, distress and inadequacy in modern
life (Freud 1900/1976). The ‘examination dream’ remains a common symptom of anxiety
to this day, and there is no easy solution on the horizon. What kinds of reforms are
possible? What kinds will make a difference? How do we steer a path between the
extravagance of the unrealistically romantic and the timidity of the depressingly realistic?
Will this contradictory symbol of our modernity also offer us some paths towards a
redemptive recovery of agency?
Amidst all the uncertainties that surround these questions, the only firm discovery (if that
is the term!) we can claim to have made is that social structure cannot be wished away.
Examinations are like symptoms, and unless we have a sense of the underlying social
pressures and tensions that they are expressions of, we cannot hope to affect them in
any lasting way.
I will leave you with a question asked of us by ‘Bollywood’, or the fertile world of
commercial Indian cinema. One indication of the resilience and power of the ideology of
the examination is provided by the popular film 3 Idiots. Despite the main storyline being
vehemently opposed to the values fostered by competitive examinations, what is it that
compels even such an unconventional film to have its hero come first in just such an
examination? Why is it that a hero cannot even come second, leave alone get a second
division or, horror of horrors, actually fail in an examination? Until we have some sort of
answer for this question, I suspect that someone else delivering this lecture in my place a
decade hence may feel compelled to speak, once again, about examinations and their
many discontents.
37
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