Inside India's Exam Culture: IITs and IIMs

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Every year, more than a million Indian teenagers sit an engineering entrance examination for a few tens of thousands of seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and a few hundred thousand graduates sit a management aptitude test for a similarly small number of places at the Indian Institutes of Management. Around those two examinations has grown an industry, a migration pattern, a genre of cinema and a public health concern. To an outsider the intensity can look inexplicable. It becomes comprehensible once you understand that these are not simply good colleges: they are the narrow gate through which a very large country funnels claims to elite status, and the supply of places behind the gate has never grown as fast as the number of people at it.

How the institutes were built

The IIT system was a deliberate act of state building. A committee appointed in the mid 1940s recommended a set of higher technical institutions on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first opened at Kharagpur in West Bengal in 1951, on the site of a former detention camp at Hijli. Four more followed, each built with a different foreign partner as Cold War aid: Bombay in 1958 with Soviet assistance, Madras in 1959 with West German assistance, Kanpur in 1959 through a consortium of American universities under the Kanpur Indo American Programme, and Delhi in 1961 with British support. Parliament passed the Institutes of Technology Act in 1961, declaring them institutions of national importance and giving them a degree of autonomy over curriculum and appointments that ordinary universities do not enjoy. The system has since expanded in waves, most heavily after 2008, to twenty three institutes.

The management institutes have a parallel history. IIM Calcutta and IIM Ahmedabad were both established in 1961, the first with technical collaboration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School and the second with Harvard Business School, the latter driven substantially by the physicist and institution builder Vikram Sarabhai. Ahmedabad's campus, designed by Louis Kahn in exposed brick, is itself a landmark of modern architecture. IIM Bangalore followed in 1973 and the network has since grown to twenty institutes. Until the Indian Institutes of Management Act of 2017 they awarded diplomas rather than degrees, because they were registered societies rather than universities; the Act converted them into degree granting institutions and gave their boards greater autonomy.

The machine around the exam

Admission to the IITs runs through a two stage examination. Candidates first sit JEE Main, conducted since 2019 by the National Testing Agency, in multiple sessions across hundreds of centres. A cut off, currently set so that on the order of a quarter of a million candidates advance, admits them to JEE Advanced, which the IITs themselves set and which determines admission to roughly seventeen thousand undergraduate seats. The arithmetic is brutal and it is the whole explanation for what follows. The medical equivalent, NEET, draws an even larger cohort. Admission to the IIMs runs through the Common Admission Test, a computer based test of quantitative ability, verbal reasoning and data interpretation, followed by interviews and written assessment, with academic record and work experience weighted differently by each institute.

Because the examination is the only thing that counts, and because school boards test recall rather than problem solving, a private coaching sector has grown to fill the gap. Its capital is Kota in Rajasthan, an industrial town that reinvented itself around residential coaching after institutions founded there in the 1980s and 1990s, including the classes started by the engineer V. K. Bansal, began producing conspicuous results. Tens of thousands of students move to Kota each year, live in hostels and paying guest accommodation, and follow a schedule of lectures and tests that runs most of the waking day. A related practice has spread nationally: students enrol in so called dummy schools that mark them present while they attend coaching full time, sitting the school leaving board examination as a formality.

The human cost has become impossible to ignore. Kota has recorded a painful number of student suicides, with 2023 among the worst years on record, and the district administration has required measures such as anti fall netting on hostel balconies, mandatory counsellors and screening of test results before they are published to parents. In January 2024 the Ministry of Education issued national guidelines for coaching centres, including a bar on enrolling students below the age of sixteen, restrictions on misleading advertising of results, and requirements for refunds and for mental health support. Whether guidelines can change a market driven by parental demand is doubtful, and many practitioners say so openly.

What the system selects for, and what it misses

Defenders of the examination make a serious argument. In a society stratified by caste, region, language and family connection, a single anonymous, objectively marked test is one of the few mechanisms that a candidate without patronage can win on merit. Reservation policy sits on top of it: fifteen per cent of seats for Scheduled Castes, seven and a half per cent for Scheduled Tribes, twenty seven per cent for Other Backward Classes following the Supreme Court's 2008 decision upholding that quota in central institutions, and ten per cent for economically weaker sections introduced in 2019 and upheld by the Court in 2022. The IITs have unquestionably produced a professional class that reaches from Indian industry to the senior ranks of American technology companies.

The criticisms are equally serious. A test that rewards speed on a predictable problem set can be trained for, and training costs money, so the examination transmits advantage rather than neutralising it: children of educated urban parents who can fund two years of coaching are heavily overrepresented among successful candidates. The curriculum focus narrows adolescence to physics, chemistry and mathematics at the expense of everything else. Sorting the entire cohort by a single number encourages the belief that the number is a verdict on the person, which is the mechanism behind the mental health crisis. And the underlying scarcity is not being addressed by adding institutes at the top: what limits Indian higher education is the quality of the several thousand ordinary engineering colleges below the elite tier, many of which have empty seats and poor placement records even as the entrance examinations grow more crowded.

The examination culture, in other words, is a symptom of an unequal distribution of institutional quality rather than a cause of it, and the pressure will not ease until a student can get a good engineering or management education somewhere other than through the narrow gate.

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