NEET-JEE: It’s time to enable students to ‘take’, not ‘give’, exams
a reasonable period, typically three years. Every public library, whether attached to a college, university or not, can become an examination centre on call. Ideally, the examination can be online and on call, but if that proves difficult, then on a few set dates every quarter. There is no reason to link the application process to the examination process when technology has raced ahead of old administrative mores. Covid-19 catalyses this essential paradigm change.
Students who are ready can bank their preparation and take their exam now. Others must have another chance every few months, if not on-demand, with institutional proctoring. What, then, happens to the muchvaunted rankings and percentiles? They can be normalised on an updated distribution curve across time. In many ways, this is fairer to all students across circumstances. This only calls on simple statistics taught by the very people who set these papers.
This is a time to seek another shift too — one of scale. Even with the exams held now, a semester may already have been lost. We have already come to a crisis where there will be a bunching of students and batches during the Covid-19 years. In managing that, we have a chance to scale up engineering and medical capacity. For years, many have been calling for scaling up current professional colleges by leveraging capacity, enabling support faculty and digital potential in line with many schools of excellence globally. Rearranging courses into modules with sequential requirements, and including blended learning, will enable scale shifts.
During the crisis, most learning is digital, and these modules may need further bridge courses in later years. There is also a good case to be made for running at least two batches per year, with separate starts.
Multiple exams, multiple starts will give relief to those who did not have the resources to make it to the exam this time. This combined approach of sequential requirements, modular digital courses and bridge courses may serve the country during the Covid-19 crisis and beyond.