"Life is a race!" exclaims the character of Veerusahastra Bhudde aka 'virus' in the film '3 Idiots' as students watching turn pale on seeing the broken egg on the floor. He also says that though many applications for admissions pour in every year only few get selected for the undergraduate courses. Now you say that is obvious since a college or an institution can hold only a limited number of seats.
As the saying goes like this,"As going gets tough, the tough gets going". In recent years, we have seen a steep rise in competition along with a rise in the number of aspirants for admissions in engineering, medical and MBA courses. Entrance exams like IIT-JEE and CAT have been testing students for past many years. Their pattern of testing also had changes with the changing times, students and teachers opinions also changed as days passed. Daily, many students from 8th to 10th standards have IIT foundation classes in their hectic schedules and those of 10th classes, at the end of academic year even have entrance exams for coaching centres alongside board exams.
The situation
In our society, the sound of 'class 10' and 'class 12' makes even a common householder get concerned about because its time for board exams! So what do we mean by this extra thing 'board'? Answers written for a common paper at end of the year goes out of the school for evaluation. Its as simple as that and over here the marks that show up in your final certificate can have weightage an various things and people after your exam keep on asking you "what is your percent, Beta?"
I remember once my maths teacher in 10th saying "You have three stages in life where you need to put that 'extra' effort i.e. in 10th, 11th and 12th classes and after this your life will be ......" (whatever you think). At that moment I pondered about it, did not get any likely answer. Now, I did. The answer lies in the magnitude of competition about which we have discussed earlier.
So, how to beat this and make it to the top? Here starts our journey. The best answer that likely seems to be is preparation, everyone does that but secret lies in the way you are doing it. For instance, at my junior college, we have a whopping strength of nearly 400 students in class 12 alone, and we have been separated into separate sections based on the marks we have obtained in our weekly mock entrance tests at starting of the year but the faculty has not been biased in this way. All these sections have students holding different levels of potential. That is a good thing since our teachers know where lies our strengths and weaknesses. I will not be telling you to which batch I belong to since the 'batch' has now became a symbol of status among my peers.
In the media
Every week, I have a glimpse at the 'education' columns of local dailies and the articles sent by several lecturers. The interesting part is that most of these deal about 'cracking' entrances or making high score in board exams. They even discuss the important parts of various syllabi for competitive exams. I feel that they are not discussing what is supposed to be done in the columns as far as the title at the top is concerned, its just beating around the bush. This is today's status of education for these three years in our country when the student has to develop scientific temperament and curiosity to explore the nature and find out how it works.
Result
All the pressures upon sit like a cobweb in the student's mind at the stage when it deserves to be calm and peaceful. I, myself an engineering aspirant feel that a student, nowadays is not being given choice to express his or her views. Students nowadays are resorting to just remembering the main essence instead of the concept. Having the whole idea can act as a canvas of the whole picture rather than a single element in it.
Solution
Here lies the solution to the question posed earlier. A pupil has to have a scientific, interrogative bent of mind towards his or her life. They have to ask questions frequently and be active in whatever work that is being done. Forget the competition. Thinking about it is like looking down from the edge of a high cliff. Instead we have to look up and shout 'I can'. Its not even fair to think about the exams. If you are sound in your concepts and can solve a plethora of problems, that is more than enough to 'crack' these exams. Hard work cannot be defined in words but can be simplified as just involving ourselves totally in whatever we are doing.
In this way the 'mania' can be cleared.
