News: What comes after the perfect score?

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

What comes after the perfect score?

The one-stop for the biggest shifts in India's $180 billion education market. Served hot and weekly, Thursdays.

Good Morning Dear Reader,

I'm Olina and for the last three years, I've written over 80 stories for The Ken on edtech, education, careers, and lifelong learning. If you're a regular reader of The Ken, you may recognise my work chronicling the biggest changes and events in India's edtech sector—whether that's an impending loan crisis at one of India's biggest education companies, or the public silencing of critics by some of India's most prominent edtechs.

Trust me, there's never a dull day in education. Especially not since the pandemic lit a fire under the sector and forced changes that would've taken years, if not decades, to materialise. Big edtechs are now giant, lumbering predators, who casually spend US$2 billion to acquire other startups. Schools are struggling to stay financially viable and the government is on an overdrive to create digital public goods in education. Nothing will go back to "normal" again.

But it's also a time for heady euphoria. There have never been more education companies turning into unicorns. And for the first time ever, Indian education companies are setting a global agenda with their money and influence. China's crackdown on its education businesses is a handy plot device.

But talking about education isn't just counting the VC dollars that flow into businesses. Talking about education, now, is to write at the intersection of business, technology, and policy that shapes and defines who gets to learn what.

And that's why The Ken is adding a brand-new product in the mix. A weekly newsletter called Ed Set Go, helmed by me. Week on week, I will bring you my insights on what I think is at the cutting edge in the education sector. I will try and decode, ahead of time, where the winds are shifting to and why.

This is also just one of seven new newsletters that we are launching this week. If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend you check them out here. And do keep an eye out for another brand-new newsletter tomorrow morning!

What comes after the perfect score?

This week, Delhi University, a sought-after, multicultural melting pot of disciplines and students, announced its dreaded admissions cut-off list. For a record 11 subjects, top-tier DU colleges have asked for a substantial pound of flesh from aspiring applications: a perfect 100% in their board examinations.

This isn’t the first year that colleges have applied the 100% admission criteria. It's the third since 2011, but never before has it been at this scale. 90 programmes this year have asked for a 99% cut-off score. (A cut-off is the minimum amount of marks you need to qualify for a programme.)

This should technically be a disaster for students. They should be out on the streets, tearing this admissions process to shreds. A 100% score should be an anomaly and not the norm.

Right? Right?

Not exactly. Not when cut-offs are actually only a reflection of what students, on average, scored in their school graduating exams. And for the last few years, these scores have rapidly moved north. A phenomenon I’d like to coin as “marksflation”.

This excerpt from a report in the Times of India, paints a succinct picture:

If you go by marks awarded, Indian students have turned in their best ever performance in a year they seldom went to school and never took the final exam.

CBSE Class X and XII boards have passed a record 99.04% and 99.37% students respectively, with those scoring above 95% jumping 38% and 81%. This extraordinary uptick is echoed across state boards. For example, Maharashtra HSC results have witnessed a gravity-defying 1,000% rise in the 90% category.

The 95% problem: School results show grade inflation epidemic. College entrance process must adapt, The Times of India

The cartoonish 1,000% rise in the 90% category is celebratory—but only within the student’s post-exam bubble. It’s mostly terrible for actual admission to a place like DU. There’s a simple demand and supply push-and-pull at work here.

There is an over-supply of grades and an under-supply of seats, especially when in certain fateful years like 2019, students with a 95% score went from 17,000 in the previous year to 38,000. Colleges are already bursting at their seams, even if they have tried to allocate more seats every year for certain popular courses. If a central university has to add seats via porta-cabins and partition existing classrooms to fit in students, something has gone terribly wrong with marksflation. There was even a 10% increase in seats during the pandemic year 2020, when all classes went online. So colleges actually have no real time experience on how they’re going to fit in the extra students.

In 2021, DU has 70,000 seats on offer for which more than 400,000 students have applied. 70,004 students have scored above 95% in one central board alone, but it’s still not good enough to get them into college.

How did it come to this?

The clash of two broken systems…

…makes a deafening noise.

System 1 deals with everything that happens before the admission process. This system is controlled by school boards like the CBSE, the ICSC, and other state government boards, who score exams given by grade 12 students across India. Taking board exams, as anyone who’s been through this system knows, is grueling work. But these are exams that can be easily “cracked”. There’s a whole after-school tuition industry dedicated to this, and school boards have also introduced more opportunities like multiple choice questions for students to score better.

This isn’t a problem in itself, because exams have to evolve with the times. The real problem starts when an examiner gets involved.

In 2017, online news portal Firstpost had published a semi-expository account by two researchers who allege that skewed marking by different school boards have led to massive grade inflation in marks over the years. In fact, they call it a farcical “grade distortion”. The report goes into great detail about the subjectivity of marking and the logistics of getting through literally thousands of answer sheets on time. But it also devotes a lot of time to the specific issue of “keywords”.

A teacher, who has been ICSE chief coordinator…said that the marking scheme was unacceptably biased in favour of 'keywords'. In what he said was grossly unfair to students, the marking scheme and keywords themselves change substantially from year-to-year, with little transparency or basis. Giving an example from Biology… till a few years back the word "solvent", and not "water", was accepted as correct in the definition of the process of osmosis. But an abrupt and unannounced change meant the latter started being accepted as correct.

CBSE Class 12th 2017 board exam results withheld: Grade distortion is a serious public policy problem, Firstpost

The marking is arbitrary but, on the whole, boards have become increasingly geared to pass people by creating a weird system of "parity score" buckets.

(There's a spike at 33 as scores are allegedly "upped" to make students pass. Everyone who scores between 74% and 95% are rationalised to 95%. Source: Firstpost report)

The "marksflation" is more than apparent in this graph.

(Source: Firstpost report)

System 1, which should be based on an objective marking scheme, has become subjective, arbitrary, and unpredictable. Politically too, it looks better for states to send out a horde of 95%-ers, instead of a deflated student crowd hobbled with low scores and dim prospects. During the pandemic year, most individual schools had the reins on scoring their students, which is unprecedented. So obviously, no one failed, and according to teachers I’ve spoken with, marks were skewed upwards because, hey, why wouldn’t you want to make your school look good in a competitive market?

This is where System 2 comes into play, which is everything that happens once the boards have jettisoned their high-scorers. System 2 is under the control of public and private universities who decide what their admission criteria is going to be. Well, private universities decide.

Public universities—particularly DU—have little choice but to chisel their system to serve an inflexible statistic. And it’s moving in the exact opposite direction to the marksflation process.

To understand why this happened, we need to turn the clock back to the 1960s. Pankaj Jha, a professor of history at Lady Shri Ram college—notorious for its 100% cut-offs—can’t remember a time when marks were not a criterion for admission. “But every college, and even departments within colleges, had a lot of latitude in admissions. There was a difference between what different colleges or departments looked for. It wasn’t uniform. Certain subjects would carry more weightage,” Jha told me over a phone call. Jha himself is a product of DU, and remembers how female students got a 5% marks concession during his admissions process in 1987.

Too much latitude though meant too much subjectivity. And everything outside the DU system was pushing against it. There was an “arbitrariness” to the process, says Jha, which wasn’t very transparent. Teachers could exercise their “privilege” and have biases in favour of, say, English-medium students. College politics also changed, and more power went to the head, instead of individual departments. Jha says that over the last four decades, the DU admission process has moved away from arbitrariness, and stripped a complex and subjective process down to a single statistic.

The cut-off.

And since cut-offs are the only yardstick, colleges are forced to push the ceiling to its absolute height—the 100%—in order to balance admissions with limited infrastructure.

System 1 became more arbitrary and inclusive.

System 2 became more objective and exclusive.

Stuck in the middle are students—with way too many marks, but a shocking lack of options.

I know what you’re thinking. DU isn’t the only central university in India. Can’t students apply anywhere else? Just avoid this cut-off nonsense?

(Source: Livemint)

That’s easier said than done, especially when state-run colleges and universities have declined in quality and infrastructure. And through policy, states have chosen to promote privatise college education instead of pouring more money or time into their own state-run institutions.

Private institutions have their own, time-wrought gatekeeper that trumps marks. It’s money.

The perfect score should lead to a perfect future. But these two imperfect public education systems, that should be working in tandem, are working against each other. To break out of these vicious cycles, one score has to matter less. The other will automatically temper itself.

Back Bench

Aspiring doctors pushed for a #RENEET after the question paper for NEET, a centralised medical exam, was leaked via WhatsApp. A Supreme Court bench decided not to cancel the exam, despite the breach. But a cancellation would've worked just fine for Tamil Nadu's chief minister, who's asked 12 other states to join his chorus against the NEET exam because it has "undermined diverse social representation in higher medical studies".

Vedantu officially became India's fifth edtech unicorn. In a year full of IPO promises and unmitigated funding, it's a milestone that the company's been looking forward to. Guess what happened a day later? Byju's raised its latest round at a US$18 billion valuation, moving the due north for the sector a little further. It must be frustrating to be anyone but Byju's just now.

Schools are gradually re-opening for younger grades too. But full attendance is a far cry away. Maybe it's time to think about edtech in schools, not after it.

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