NEET initiative, but is this neat enough?

State’s programme to run special training centres for competitive exams a step in right direction, but will fail if not implemented effectively
Students at a government-run coaching class in Coimbatore on Saturday. The State has tied up with a private coaching institute for better results |  A Raja Chidambaram
Students at a government-run coaching class in Coimbatore on Saturday. The State has tied up with a private coaching institute for better results | A Raja Chidambaram

CHENNAI: Last Monday, the Tamil Nadu government kick-started 25 competitive exam training centres to provide students across the State, access to study materials and exposure to exams such as NEET and JEE. However, government school teachers and aspirants fear this effort will not have any short-term impact and may not produce the expected outcome. While training government school students for competitive exams opens new opportunities, has this scheme been implemented at the wrong time in a wrong way?

The State has joined hands with SPEED Medical Institute, a private coaching centre, to impart simultaneous video training and facilitate interaction between centres set up across different locations, including Thoothukudi, Gobichettipalayam, Namakkal, Edappadi and Uthangarai.

Lack of resources

A total of 73,000 have already applied and the list of aspirants for exams such as NEET and JEE roll down to lakhs. However, only 200 government school teachers per subject will have undergone training to teach for competitive exams and use ‘smart technology’ before classes begin on Saturday.  “We have a centre in our block, but children from neighbouring blocks have applied too. Students who come from Naguneri have to travel 80km,” said a teacher from Tirunelveli district, adding that students may not be able to travel if classes are conducted everyday.

Going by the figures, every centre will have to accommodate nearly 3,000 students and every subject teacher, who has taught only State syllabus so far, will have to handle 1,460 students who aspire to crack national-level exams. The ratio is, however, is expected to improve once the promised 412 centres are set up by the end of the year.

Time crunch

The programme will run for 30 weeks, with classes scheduled only on  weekends. JEE is likely to held in early April (20 weeks away) and NEET in early May (25 weeks away).
Teachers fear that there is barely any time to train students with mid-terms and revision tests around the corner. “There is very little gap after public exams to give everyday training for competitive tests,” said a government school teacher from Tirunelveli district.

He fears that most students and parents will drop out from classes closer to public exams to ensure that they score well in at least one. With only a few weeks of training, these students will be up against aspirants who go to private coaching classes from as early as class six. Most programmes offer at least a two-year course that begins after class ten. “Students need to have a relatively deeper understanding of the subject to crack these exams. Going through question papers in the last few weeks will not help,” a teacher from Thiruvannamalai said.

While only a few hundred students may get the chance to study at the 25 centres already open, students who enroll in upcoming centres will have an even shorter time to prepare. “We will alter the teaching module to fit the time constraints of students who join in a later batch,” said Pradeep Yadav, the principal secretary to the government, School Education Department. “The ability to answer Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) questions comes only with consistent practice and repeated exposure to such application-based problems,” said A Murugan (name changed), a physics teacher who has been training students for JEE for the last 17 years in the city.

Quality of classes

These competitive exams are mostly gateways to professional courses such as medicine and engineering. This leads to two kinds of problems.Despite there being enough preparation material, questionnaires, videos and books, teachers with whom students get to interact come from pure science and math backgrounds and many do not have prior experience of preparing or appearing for these exams themselves.

The second issue is that the State is motivating students to take up professional courses, reinforcing the popular career choices of “engineer or doctor” for all smart kids. While government has invested in training students for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses, the aspiration of children wanting to pursue social sciences, humanities, arts and other subjects is neglected.

According to a provisional report in 2012-13 by All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), around 40 per cent of students are enrolled in arts, humanities and social sciences courses, followed by engineering and technology (17 per cent), commerce (15 per cent) and science (12 per cent). It was also observed that there roughly was a 20 per cent drop in applicants for engineering in the last couple of years, leaving thousands of engineering seats vacant.

Doubts over impact

The initiative to encourage students to take up competitive exams for professional courses will not only exclude all students with diverse aspirations, it will also exclude all students studying in private institutions. About 37 per cent of all higher secondary schools are aided by private parties according to the paper ‘Economy of school education — A Case study of Tamil Nadu’ by NP Hariharan, published in the Journal of Economic and Social Development in 2014.

While competitive exam courses expose students from remote villages to national-level courses, the desired outcome and the impending impact remain unclear. A study conducted by IIT Guwahati in 2016, contrary to the popular opinion, revealed that more than half of the students (52 per cent) who cleared JEE prepared on their own instead of attending coaching classes.

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