Manujendra Kundu:
পরীক্ষায় আমার বরাবর ভয়। একটি অসুখকর প্রক্রিয়া। কিন্তু এ দেশে বা রাজ্যে তার কোন বিকল্প হতে পারে কি না, অনেক ভেবে তার কূল কিনারা করতে পারিনি। আপাতত তাই তারই পক্ষে। যাঁরা বলছেন humanities-এ প্রবেশিকা পরীক্ষার দরকার কী, বোর্ডের পরীক্ষার ফলাফলই যথেষ্ট, দুটো সমান্তরাল নির্বাচনী ব্যবস্থার দরকার নেই, তাঁরা খুবই ঠিক কথা বলছেন। এবং ঠিক এই যুক্তিতে JEE পরীক্ষাও তা হলে তুলে দেওয়া উচিত। এই যুক্তিতে NET/SET/SLET-এর মতো তৃতীয় শ্রেণির একটা পরীক্ষা ব্যবস্থাও তুলে দেওয়া উচিত। এবং সব রকমের সরকারি চাকরির পরীক্ষাও তুলে দেওয়া উচিত। তাহলেই যথার্থ সাম্য ধরাধামে অবতীর্ণ হবে। কিন্তু এই পরীক্ষাগুলো বন্ধ করা ঈশ্বরেরও অসাধ্য। কারণ এই পরীক্ষাগুলোর সঙ্গে সরাসরি বাজারের সম্পর্ক। তাই ছাঁকনিতে ছেঁকে তুলতেই হবে। এটাই বাজারের নির্ঘোষ। কিন্তু humanities-কে নিয়ে ছেলেখেলা করাই যায়। কারণ বাজারের তাতে কিছু যায় আসে না।
Mohona Bhadra
JUDE 2011-2016
Long before I took the entrance test in 2011, I knew I wanted to study English at Jadavpur University.
I made a lot of mistakes during admission season, including forgetting to submit requisite documents to certain colleges (thereby ruining whatever little chance I had of being considered at all). And my sad-by-ISC-standards 92 in English (coupled with an even sadder 91.5 best four aggregate) didn’t help.
I sat for two entrance tests in JU, and on both days I remember entering the campus and feeling like I belonged. I hadn’t stepped foot beyond the UG Science building at the time, but I knew then, more than ever, that this is where I wanted to be.
Even though I wasn’t sure I was good or smart or ‘worthy’ enough, it turned out that the Professors thought I was. JU gave me a chance when most other educational institutions did not, and I would not have made it to this place without the entrance test.
Jadavpur University is far from perfect, but there are some things it does right. The entrance test happens to be one of them.
Mimi Mondal:
There has been some conversation about removing the entrance test to the English department of Jadavpur University, where I did my BA and MA. I would like to add some of my thoughts to this.
I took the test in 2007, in the General category (mentionable only because I’m SC by ancestry). I finished my BA in 2010 and my MA in 2012. I haven’t lived in Calcutta since, so my subjective experiences may not be particularly recent.
The JU English entrance test used to be legendary among school students in Calcutta. (And possibly somewhat outside Calcutta, but I’m only writing what I know.) The board-exam marks cutoff to appear for the test was quite low – lower than the top English departments of other colleges in the city and the country – but the test itself was difficult and unpredictable. It did not ask questions about subjects taught in any school syllabus, but broader cultural knowledge, both Indian and English/international. I’ll admit that there wasn’t much Indian. This test was impossible to crack by mugging up. It was impossible to crack if one didn’t read extensively intellectual books, watched intellectual movies, and so on.
Is there an inherent privilege in that? Yes, of course. Only a very small population in India is equipped to partake of culture outside the school syllabus. Most schools don’t even have libraries. Our national cinema (in other words, “Bollywood”) is dumbed down and censored. Our politicians don’t even bother about accountability. We don’t have any significant public intellectual discourse, which is further bifurcated by the vernacular-vs-English divide.
I used to have many friends who were sincere, earnest students but couldn’t crack the JU English entrance test, because their backgrounds did not give them the opportunity to have a larger intellectual purview beyond what was taught at school.
I did crack that test, and not with much difficulty. For the last two years of my high school I went to an international school and studied the British Sixth Form syllabi, so I had a significantly wider (and deeper) academic range than a lot of people who studied under Indian boards.
I’ll be honest: I also went to JUDE only because I couldn’t afford to go to a university in the UK or the USA, which is what I originally wanted. I couldn’t even afford to apply.
I was a good student from an upwardly mobile family. My parents had spent more money than they could realistically afford to send me to that international school (where I was socially isolated, bullied and ridiculed because I did not belong to their social class), just to give me an edge for international applications. THEN we realized, halfway through those two years, that going to college in those countries would cost 20 times more than just taking their board exams from a school located in our city. We didn’t know that earlier, because we weren’t the kind of family where this kind of knowledge was common. We realized that even selling off everything we owned couldn’t pay for a year at a British or American university. We realized that even sending applications to a practical number (let’s say 4-5) of universities would send my parents into a year of debt.
So I went to JUDE instead, and got a world-class education for 200 rupees a year.
My friends at JUDE were all upper-caste and every single one of them financially better off than my family. They didn’t always throw it at my face, but when you’re one of the have-nots you always notice what the others have, and they in turn often fail to notice what you don’t. The friend who hosted all the parties because her house was in a beautiful neighbourhood with a beautiful view, with enough space for everyone to stretch out; the friend who travelled abroad for vacations and visited all the historical sites I would only ever gaze at on the Internet; the friend whose family just happened to be professors and other intellectuals – these friends weren’t actively, intentionally oppressing me, but I never ever felt like an equal. I never felt I could measure up. I had to work harder, study harder, google a lot of “what is…” for things that everyone else seemed to know since their childhood.
But I could afford to go to JUDE. And I did that because it was a government university (a near-equivalent of the term “state school” in the USA), and cost 200 rupees a year.
I have lived in both the UK and the USA since, and learned something else that I did not know before. That not everyone in these countries can afford to go to college, even their own citizens earning in their own currencies. Their “state schools” don’t cost an equivalent of 200 rupees; they cost much much more, and then private universities cost even more to attend. College education is a privilege in these countries, unless it’s something that middle-class parents save up for all their lives, starting even before the children are born. College education is largely not a matter of merit or intention.
Whatever else we may not have in India, we’re still doing better than that. Our best colleges and universities are still the state-sponsored ones with the extremely low fees.
On the other hand, there are unofficial cultural barriers – things like that entrance test – which make sure that students from extremely underprivileged backgrounds don’t often make it to the very top institutions like JUDE. (Hold on to that “don’t often.” I’ll come back to it.) They could possibly fork out the fees but they fail the entrance test, which culls out only those who have had the opportunity to have a wider cultural appreciation beyond school.
Now what does the existence of that test do? It brings in a class that is already prepared to start from a fairly high level of education and original thinking, which is important for a humanities class, and more important in a country like India, where history, culture, morality etc. are highly propagandized. India is a country where especially the humanities subjects (English, history etc.) are supposed to be “by-hearted,” which is to say memorized without understanding or discussing. English as a subject especially bears the burden of this. For the historically aware, you’ll remember that the study of English literature started in India during the British period as a language-learning tool for clerks of the Empire. Those original English syllabi in India were designed very specifically to keep Indians at the clerk level, not give them the intellectual tools to be able to criticize the Empire or understand what the British were doing at the higher administrative levels. Your ancestors (not particularly my ancestors, who were blissfully English-illiterate village farmers till the last generation) “by-hearted” things like Romantic poetry – extremely anti-establishment in its nature – as idle speculation on flowers and skies.
This framework and mindset largely still exists in school board syllabi as well as most college syllabi in India. English is a language-learning tool; not a vehicle for ideas, many of them contradictory to the propagandized crap that we’re fed. In many other institutions in India, even at the college level, students of English don’t learn to do research or even write mindfully argued answers. They “by-heart” the primary texts and pre-made answers from tuition classes which they don’t care to fully understand; spill those out at the written exams; and get out with a degree. Often they get very high grades, because those systems are designed to award very high grades to those who can spill out pages of memorized text like that.
JUDE bypasses that general trend by meticulously culling its class, and by also being part of a small, non-collegiate university, where the professors can set their own syllabi, question papers and standards of achievement. There are no tuition classes for JUDE. (There are certainly other hacks to get good grades without developing an equivalent appreciation of the subject, no system is completely unbreachable, and an English department is not the CIA; but at least those hacks don’t exist in such a large mass-produceable scale as tuition classes and by-hearting under those other systems.) Quite a few of our graduates, even those with high grades, go on to be not particularly remarkable in later life. That is inevitable. But overall, by removing itself from the general trend of the English academic system in India, JUDE manages to provide a fairly high-level academic and critical education to its students.
What if JUDE didn’t do that culling? That standard of education would drop. I’m someone who strongly believes that intelligence or merit is not an inherited quality. I wouldn’t have been who I am if it was. So I’m the last person to claim that a student who has not had the opportunity to study anything besides the school syllabus before college cannot become an original intellectual in the future. But it’s a much longer road for that student; and for a long time they would be at a different section of the road, and developing at a different pace, than the peer who is already far ahead, possibly for no other factor but the social circumstances they were born in. Put those two students in a classroom, and their intellectual needs would have nothing in common with one another.
And a class, a course, an academic degree has a limited timeframe. Even a day has the limited timeframe of 24 hours. Those two students cannot be taught the same things within the same timeframe. I spoke of myself earlier – how I had to do more of everything just to catch up with my JUDE classmates. It was possible only because the difference between them and me wasn’t that large if you consider the overall range in India. I was a city child; my English language skills were already perfect; I already had the slight academic advantage of having studied at an international school; I was Internet-savvy; I already had the habit of reading outside the syllabus, which I did as a thing of enjoyment, not a chore (so it energized rather than depleted me). I was no longer the top student in my class, which I had been all my school life, but I didn’t fail or drop out, and didn’t have to ask for remedial classes, which a department like JUDE doesn’t have the resources to offer extensively.
Remove the entrance test and you’ll end up with a class of students who are undeniably brilliant (I’m never questioning that) but at a much different level of development, and the entire degree will have to change to teach different things. Can good work still be done at level? Yes, but not the same work. A lot of other English departments in India are already doing that work. Even as they operate within the largely by-heart culture, they’re helping the few rare students who want to become original intellectuals. Remove that entrance test and you’ll destroy one of the few English departments in India which offer the other level of education, still for the price of 200 rupees.
And guess who that will burn the most? The students like me. A lot of my JUDE classmates could afford to study abroad but chose not to because world-class education was available for cheaper right at home. If JUDE stops offering that world-class education, those students will simply go abroad. Only the ones like me – who were already prepared to go deeper into the subject but absolutely could not afford to study at a foreign university – will be stuck with classmates who are doing the work they have already done, patiently waiting till everyone catches up before they can learn more advanced things, in time that the students from wealthier families have shot far off into the horizon.
While no human being is unequal at birth, social circumstances determine the distance they have to traverse to get to a certain place in life, and an entrance test to an English department in India isn’t setting those social circumstances. That entrance test comes much later in the process. Before that comes the by-heart culture of humanities school syllabi in India. Before that comes the fact that our general population is fed a highly propagandized, inarguable version of literature, history, culture, morality – practically all of reality. Before that comes the fact that in India we don’t have a public intellectual culture, so that even the students who only studied their school syllabi (but did it earnestly) and watched Bollywood movies for fun would automatically possess critical thinking skills comparable to similar students in First World countries. Before that comes the fact that girls – a large proportion of English students in any country – aren’t even encouraged to think, argue, have “unpleasant” opinions or read “morally objectionable” books in most families in India. The JUDE entrance test isn’t doing all of that. It’s merely sifting out whoever it can find by the time they’re already 17, 18, 19 years old.
By doing that, yes of course it’s by default picking out the most privileged of any demographic, including me. The most visible, articulate members of any minority are always the ones who have had the best social circumstances among them, not the most oppressed, barely-surviving ones. (So yes, I’m a “privileged Dalit,” with all those advantages that I listed earlier.) But privilege doesn’t only exist along one vertical, or at the same level. I was better educated and financially more comfortable than most other Dalits, but I was still poorer and less advanced than my classmates at JUDE. I was just good enough to survive, be a middling student, within that advanced level of education. But I was prepared enough to be admitted to JUDE, and be able to absorb a large part of what I was taught, and it has propelled me further in life than a less advanced level of college education would have. And it was cheap enough for my parents to afford, without which any amount of preparedness on my part would’ve meant nothing. (Like it didn’t for Oxford or Cambridge.) I still don’t always measure up to my former classmates who came from families with generations of wealth and education, but I’m somewhere there, and if I didn’t go to JUDE when I was 19, I probably wouldn’t have been.
So I’m glad that an English department like JUDE existed in my city, and the fact that the strict entrance test made it possible, rather than an exorbitant price. It wasn’t an entirely smooth college life for me, and it’s far from a perfect system, but it was better than what it would’ve been otherwise for someone of my circumstances. That’s all (at very great length) I have to say.
Mouli Das
Right from the initial days of my undergraduation at Loreto College, I was utterly dissatisfied owing to the fact the girls of our college never get to fetch top-notch marks at the Calcutta University exams. However, Loreto filled all the shortcomings to the brim, inspired us to think freely, write answers critically, not adhering to the University’s archaic mould. This ‘liberal’ practice was in stark contrast to the other colleges under the University. We were taught by the most wonderful professors to whom I’m indebted for a lifetime and we were screened us through a fair entrance test during our admission. Cut to the onset of my Post-graduation days, I made it to the merit list of Masters of English and Comparative Literature course at Pondicherry University, but It was Jadavpur University where I wanted to set my foot into, explore the discipline of Comparative Literature. India saw the inception of the subject in JU and I always wanted to peek into the subject through the best of the best professors, the place which witnessed the taste of trailblazers like Buddhadev Bose, Nabaneeta Dev Sen. Throughout the 2 years course of my post graduations, I learnt a subject that opened up new vistas of knowledge, I presented academic papers in National and International conferences which enriched me to the core. Both these institutions where I studied held entrance tests in higher order than mere marks, and that’s exactly how it should be. The marks obtained by a candidate in board exams can never be the yardstick of their latent potential since had it been so, many wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study what they really wanted and that’s where entrance tests ensure a transparent judgement. Jadavpur University, presently ranked 6th in India according to the National Institutional Ranking Framework 2018, HRD Ministry and 127th in Asia according to the TIMES Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2018 should not have had seen this day. I really hope things look up and JU goes back to being the glory it is. Churning out hackneyed clones and succumbing to formulaic education isn’t what suits JU. We are all in this together.
Medha Chatterjee
A lot has been written and said over the happenings at JU in the last few days.
it’s saddening to see the current state of affairs. It is nothing but a deliberate act by the ruling party to instil some sort of political control over the only territory which it hasn’t been able to conquer to this date.
The JU admission test has been taking place since as long as I can remember and the English entrance test is the most legendary. 6 years ago, when I had made it through the halls of the Anita Banerjee Memorial Hall, the euphoria of having cracked what is considered to be one of the most challenging tests, knew no bounds. Over the years, I have had issues with the system and how things run at JU, but the dedication and sincerity with which these tests are religiously held every year were one of the very few reasons why my hopes in the Indian education system weren’t completely shattered.
It’s increasingly being very apparent to me that merit can never be judged by the marks that you receive in your exams. The resume of your life is way more complex and layered than a checklist of bullet points and random numbers. Quantifying certain aspects of life are important for comparison and benchmarking but they always fall short when hidden contexts, critical thinking and socio-cultural aspects are at play.
For all its faults, JU has managed to nurture a number of scholars, academicians, varied opinions and unorthodox viewpoints over the years which sets it apart from all other academic centres following a singular discourse. It has been a place of self-discovery for many students whose voices wouldn’t have been heard otherwise.
And for that representation to remain, it is imperative that the admission tests are held, multiple voices are heard and dreams of many hopeful young adults are realised.
Having said that, I think that there ought to be a re-evaluation of the messages sent out on public platforms. I have come across many bizarre posts from eminent people holding a diatribe against an age defined by data analytics or technical studies and management institutions. While I do agree that few streams of education do require quite a lot of investment on the students’ part, it really fails me how or why that is looked at with such distaste. It’s a choice, just like everything else ought to be.
I have no qualms admitting that I believe in capitalism.
I want to be an entrepreneur, a brand-builder, a strategic-thinker and a successful businesswoman. I also believe in fairness, equitable opportunities and good faith. These black and white definitions of societal good and evil are limiting, provide a misguided view and take away from the point at hand.
With that, I rest my case.
And yes, #HandsOffJU
Mercia Rozario
There were two reasons why I left Xavier’s for Loreto College when I got accepted into both for B.A. – I was really attached to Loreto at that time and secondly, Xavier’s didn’t have an admission test. They accepted me purely on account of Christian quota. My religion is personal to me and I didn’t want it to affect my position in the world even if that position was that of privilege. LC on the other hand conducted an admission test. On the first day of college, the HOD told me that she had corrected my paper and that it reflected a person who has a ‘mind of her own’. It’s highly fulfilling to know you have made it through an institution purely on account of intellectual capacity. Nevertheless, B.A. was tough for all of us at LC. The best of us found it hard to get beyond a 60 something because we didn’t feel like rote learning from Ramji Lal and S. Sen. That’s why the admission test at JU meant so much to me. I didn’t take the UG admission test but I did take the admission test at the MA level. It was a rainy day – my first memory of the day of the admission test is of me being drawn to the leafy pond. I vaguely remember taking in my immediate surroundings during the test – it was dusty and worn in a sepia-toned-old-photograph kind of a way. This part is going to sound strange – I fell in love with the dust, and although I felt distressed at the lack of knowledge I displayed about what ‘baroque’ meant, I felt this weird yet strong feeling that I was meant to belong here. Call it prayer or call it intense visualization. I dismissed the feeling after the exam was over, absolutely certain that I would never make it through. Luckily, I was wrong.
Now speaking at a practical level, this is the reason why it’s Academic suicide to scrap JUDE admission tests at the BA level, especially in a city like Kolkata. Under Calcutta University if you want to get 70+ you are supposed to cram guide books by heart. I am not going to judge students who do this because it’s not in my place to judge anyone. But admission tests, like those in JU, give students, who cannot afford tuitions or extensive number of guide books, a chance to make it through purely on account of critical acumen. I enjoyed the test questions because they tested your ability to reason, infer, understand, compare, rationalize – namely everything I am trying to drill into my students today, as a school teacher. I would never have cracked the interview for my current job or have the ability to create effective lesson plans had I not been trained to think and question.
So, #handsoffJU
Jadavpur University for Admission Tests 