Entrance for Entrance

Amit Varma points to a story about a Bihari police officer who runs a coaching class for poor students to get into the IITs:

Abhayanand, Bihar's Additional Director-General of Police (special branch), whose name once had the dreaded dacoits of Champaran region scurrying for cover, now chisels raw talents into real competitors.

Super-30, the study group he set up three years ago with the help of Anand Kumar, a Patna University topper, who runs maths tutorials for aspiring engineers and Neeraj Pratap Singh, another self-employed teacher of Chemistry, to coach Bihari boys to crack IIT examinations, has a reason to rejoice.

This year 26 students out of a batchof 30 made it to the IITs, including children of richshaw drivers and brick kiln workers. It is certainly commendable that the good AGP is helping poor kids from depressed backgrounds make it to the best engineering colleges ion the country. But the rub lies in the next paragraph:

Super-30 charges nothing for teaching, accomodation and food it provides to the students admitted after a two-stage test. Two hundred students are selected from 3,000, who appear at the screening test and of these 30 are chosen after another examination. (Emphasis mine)

The coaching class for the IIT entance test has an entrance test as rigourous as that of the IITs! Soon students will need a coaching class to get into this coaching class! It is also a sad commentary on our education system that the only way a student who is not from a priviledged background can make it to a good college is to give a ridiculously difficult test to get a chance to study their behinds off just to clear yet another entrance test. This sucks.

Posted in Education.