Should we certify the quality at "exit"?

In today’s India, not a day goes by without a comment on NEET (the entrance exam for medical courses) or any such entrance exam. If some student meets with an unfortunate end citing pressures, blame it on the entrance exam. Going by that logic, we should scrap all exams!  Education belongs to the centre – state area and is used or misused by both. Some states think their board education system is the best and they have the right to decide how they would admit their students. Other states follow an entrance examination. In a big country like ours and given our landscape and rural population, it is only right that all these factors are considered.

The problem arises when these factors are used to label or certify a person for his/her skills. Our focus should be on helping less fortunate amongst us and bringing them up to a nationally or globally recognizable standard. The second challenge is that we have guaranteed the right for any Indian citizen to live anywhere in the country. When a qualified person moves from one domicile to another, he or she carries the qualifications, skills and capabilities too. These should be transferable across India whether they refer to plumbing or medicine or engineering.

The first step is to define the associated capabilities/skills both technical and non-technical clearly.

This is not dissimilar to the learning outcomes. By the word “doctor”, we assume the person has certain capabilities. These do not arise because the person has passed 50 courses in medicine related subjects or has studied from a top medical college. It comes with a certain level of mastery of specific subject areas and/or associated experience. These areas can be studied as two subjects in certain universities or 4 subjects. That doesn’t matter. By listing all the capabilities, we have many advantages. The subject areas can be modified/updated depending on the way the profession evolves. The people, pursuing this profession, have clear ideas on the outcome. It also brings in consistent nomenclature to be used throughout the country. We have colleges, in India, that award “Metallurgical engineering”; “Metallurgical engineering and material science”; “Material science and metallurgical engineering”. No one knows how the capabilities of each differ. This is, certainly, not a diversity to be celebrated!

Once we do this, what is next? How do we screen the candidates for undergoing a course that will help them to acquire the said capabilities? Who gets to decide a 4-year course of university is better suited to this than the 5-year course of another university?  We don’t have standards for comparing universities by each degree or course rigorously. Where do the different state boards of education stand as compared to CBSE? To top it further, can a 100% marks secured in Mathematics of TN state board be considered equivalent to a 100% in West Bengal board? No, we will need far more mechanisms to do that.

We should aspire to set up validation mechanisms that compare different boards, courses and educational institutes against certain specific outcomes based on transparent parameters. The government owes this to the entire student community. The NIRF ranking is a good start. Consistent and verifiable display of information from each university is to be made mandatory. This is akin to display of credentials of every contestant in an election thanks to the electoral reforms. Today, if we look at the newspaper, the only parameter advertised by the institutes is the placement record. The student community knows not whether these claims are true. Every school boasts of its infrastructure and faculty. Look at the plight of students. How will they gather right information and make decisions? This is a subject that can be discussed on its own merits. But, right now, instead of getting into such level of details, why don’t we start with validating the quality at the exit gate? An example is a professional qualification like CA or CWA. They define the body of knowledge, type of exams to be written, quantum of practice or experience before someone can be said to have acquired this qualification. A doctor has multiple skills/capabilities to achieve before getting the official qualification and associated perks. That testing of the skill can come in the form of exams, interview, internship, practice at government hospitals etc. No matter which universities they study, they should sit for this prescribed procedure for acquiring qualification. The best thing is that these validation mechanisms are and should be only based on merit and be fool proof to tamper. Another useful option that can be evaluated is whether to make a minimum period of service in a rural area mandatory as part of the validation or immediately post-validation. This, if conceived and implemented well, will be equivalent to “Matching” that happens in the US and remove the disparities amongst the aspiring students when applying for post graduate courses.

In India, we have reservations in place to help disadvantaged people. It is very likely that these will be perpetual for no party dares to tweak it. Some states have high level and some others have medium level. Whatever they are, the respective state governments are free to decide on their applicability and choosing of students for various courses in their state. But, this will not come in when sitting for validation procedure. There is no reservation or nor a rank list. It is simply a formal and complete evaluation of the person as per the definition for acquiring the title or capability.  A doctor with a 90% marks in his final exams and another one with 75% marks, can practise medicine so long as they have successfully cleared the validation procedure. Imagine next time you visit a doctor, you don’t need to dissect his pedigree before deciding to trust yourself with him or her. Or we won’t have the problem of producing engineers who don’t know how to operate a machine or handle important tool sets!

Such a hands-off approach on the study and admission procedures to a clear well -articulated tight exit validation mechanisms are the need of the hour. We have the bar council, medical council and others who are more interested in the duration of course, facilities etc. There is nothing wrong in doing so. These can be guidelines issued and proper inspection agencies can verify the claims of universities periodically. But they should safe-guard the exit! Such a validation agency should be set up by the centre as an independent body. This body should have access to experts in various fields to set the standards of validation of knowledge and make it relevant and up-to-date.

Such a clean and professional validation body can benefit the nation as well as the aspirants in many ways. Firstly, it presents a uniform, consistent and comparable qualification mechanism. The would-be consumers can avail the services reasonably confident of the quality. Secondly, over a period of time, these skills can be made highly comparable to the western standards. Even if not, the gaps or differences can be understood clearly. For example, an Indian doctor needs to pass certain exams before getting approval to practise in the UK or US. What are these set of exams? What is that gap in the body of knowledge which these countries regard important? Answers to these will help our validation body to come out with recommendations, hold parleys with other agencies in the west and provide a clear direction in terms of upgrade or a country specific additional part as the case may be. Thirdly, the validated credentials serve as a reference/verification when the aspirants want to study abroad further. The foreign educational institutions need to be concerned only with the validation body to understand all the details. They will have less to worry about the type of semester, duration, quality of subjects studied etc. Finally, such a rigorous validation will have a domino effect in terms of raising the quality of education, infrastructure, faculty, labs etc. Students will automatically move to schools or colleges that offer them best chance of passing the validation. This will consequently put pressure on the institutes to own up and deliver quality education.