New Delhi: Coaching For Admission To The Iits And Other

NEW DELHI: Coaching for admission to the IITs and other engineering colleges has acquired the status of a big industry in India. According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the size of the industry is Rs 10,000 crore. ASSOCHAM’s conclusion is based on the assumption that six lakh students attend these classes every year and the average cost for each student is Rs 1.7 lakh, a spokesman for the industry body told TOI. The staggering sum of Rs 10,000 crore being netted every year by private academies who coach students for admission tests can fund 30 to 40 new IITs, ASSOCHAM said. Calling for deregulation of higher education, ASSOCHAM president Sajjan Jindal said the beneficiaries of the current system were those running big educational institutions and coaching centres. "The amount of money which goes to these institutions is enough to open 30 to 40 IITs with lots of seats that can ensure admission to average candidates," he said. Those familiar with the coaching industry pointed out that both figures number of students going to coaching classes and the average cost per student seem exaggerated. The average cost per student cited by ASSOCHAM is too high, they said, pointing out that the cost in smaller cities which have many successful coaching institutes is much lower. They also said the number of students attending coaching classes could be much less than six lakh. TOI had recently done a survey of the coaching classes at Kota, the hub of the III-JEE coaching industry, and arrived at a ballpark figure of Rs 550 crore for the size of the industry there. At least 50% of the students who appear in the entrance tests for admissions to IITs and other engineering colleges enrol with coaching centres to beat the cutthroat competition, ASSOCHAM said. The industry body also said that 80,000-90,000 students go abroad for higher studies, leading to a high foreign exchange outflow. "If quality institutions are provided, a large number of students will stay back and contribute to the nation," ASSOCHAM said. It said that more institutions of excellence should come up and suggested that private players and big industrial groups should be encouraged in higher education. According to ASSOCHAM, India has over 12 million students in higher education but fewer than 350,000 faculty members. Training industry gains momentum: Coaching industry has started taking its roots in India. The industry is still in the nascent stage, for it is yet to be tapped and understood properly. The concept behind coaching, not just talks about academic coaching or sports coaching or mentoring, it is an ongoing relationship which focuses on people/organisations taking action toward the realisation of their visions, goals or desires while maximising their person and professional potential. According to Sraban Mukherjee, who boasts to have handled major consultancy assignments and conducted more than 100 coaching hours in 2007 with eight clients, besides being a member of International Coaching Federation, USA, the coaching industry is not even one per cent explored in India.

“People and organisations in India are yet to understand the concept behind coaching. Once the importance of the word coaching is understood , the market for coaching business will be automatically established” , said Mukherjee. Further he added, “In countries like US and UK, coaching is a well established profession. I am expecting the market to grow by 20-30 per cent in India, in next four to five years.” The need for the right career path and stress free life will offer a lot of scope for coaching as a full time career profession. Talking about coaching industry in India, it’s basically the executive coaching which is gaining prominence these days. Executive coaching is an experiential and individualised leader development process that builds a leader’s capability to achieve short and long term organisational goals. The other different kinds of coaching that exist today include life/personal coaching, career coaching, mentor coaching, spiritual coaching, business coaching and relationship coaching. “Whether it is executive coaching or life coaching or any other niche areas of coaching , the bottom line is change. In India, executive coaching is, so far being associated with only a few companies including Hewitt, Grow Talent and Hero Mindmine. Indian School of Business in Hyderabad also conducts regular workshops on executive coaching . “Though a fewer in number, but there are companies like Wipro, Satyam, Hindustan Lever, which are known for having a very good coaching culture in India. ,

The business of coaching The multiplicity of entrance tests, the evolution of the `coaching industry' and the grind that students have to go through to stand a chance of getting a seat in top professional institutions are wreaking havoc on the country's educational system, says an academic in this two-part series.

Entrance test coaching centres are a second home for students these days. Entrance tests for admission to professional institutions have become very topical, important and controversial affecting the multitude of students, parents and administrators. The multiplicity of such tests across the country is playing havoc among students leading to harassment, cynicism, untold misery and even the criminalisation of the process. Stakes are so high on these tests that they make or mar the career of students. The artificial scarcity thus created enables vested interests to reap rich dividends. The recent leakage of papers of CAT and PMT are the manifestation of such a malady needing a thorough re-look at the whole process. Coaching industry The active involvement of coaching centres, which I prefer to call the "coaching industry," in trying to beat the system is alarming. Having been a faculty member at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, for 34 years and involved in planning technical education I am sharing my experience, concerns and views towards analysing this problem for a possible solution. First let us look at the genesis of entrance tests and their effects.

Right from inception, IITs introduced the All-India Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE) for their admissions. This was considered a normalising procedure, as varied marks of different school boards could not be used to create a common merit list. The same argument was later extended by States that started the entrance tests for admission. The Central Board of Secondary Education started PMT for select medical colleges in the country and now the AIEEE for admissions to National Institutes of Technology (NITs), formerly Regional Engineering Colleges, and also for any engineering institution which may opt for it. Recently, some private colleges have been making cartels and planning their own tests such as COMED in Karnataka. Entrance tests Thus each aspirant is forced to take at least three to four tests resulting in considerable difficulty, anxiety and cost. Clash of dates often limit the choices and the limited time gap forces them to fly at high cost. For the CET of Karnataka, special trains are run to Bangalore from Delhi, Kolkata and Ahmedabad in addition to extra flights to meet the rush. There are instances of parents and candidates sleeping on Railway platforms in Bangalore due to shortage of hotel accommodation. Needless to say that black-marketing is rampant on those days. Single test There are agents in Delhi who arrange "package deals." Should we not ponder whether the crores of rupees spent by parents and the wasteful drain on the national exchequer is worthwhile? Is it not time to think of a single entrance test for the whole country? Some IIT alumni who took the JEE in the sixties told me that they took the test a few days after their board examinations without any extra preparation. Thus their preparation for the board examination was sufficient for the JEE. This is how it should be as the intent of a common

entrance test, in spirit, is not to subject the candidates to extra preparation but to grade them on a common scale. This spirit is totally lost today with the mushrooming coaching centres. A few decades ago only weak students were expected to take private tuition and were looked down upon by merited students for whom formal teaching in the class supported by self study was sufficient to do well in the examinations. Today the situation has drastically changed due to several reasons and almost all students of the 10+2 system attend private tuition at the Plus Two level. Students from rural and semi-urban areas at a great disadvantage because coaching facilities are the best at the metros. This situation is totally against the spirit of our Constitution, which promises egalitarianism and equal opportunity. Private tuition There is now a universal perception that private tuition is a necessity to succeed in entrance tests and also for board examinations. Formal school education has taken a back seat, almost becoming redundant. Even some of the teachers manipulate to get the students to attend private classes. After matriculation, most of the students go into hibernation to prepare fully for entrance tests. They pay less attention to the board examination. Some coaching centres insist that their students should not attend family/social functions and pursue extra-curricular activities, as such distractions would affect their concentration. Psychological pressure Psychological pressure on the students is sadly telling. In many students one can see a perceptible change in attitudes during these two years of training. They are often dehumanised owing to the totally competitive

mercenary attitude. The urge to learn gives way to the urge to score. Unfortunately no study is made to correlate the performance of a candidate in entrance test when compared to board examination. This would be an interesting and relevant study to assess the impact of coaching centres. Are the tutored and successful candidates as successful in the board exam? Today many academics are raising doubts in this regard since the performance in professional colleges after admission often is not in tune with the ranking in entrance test. The coaching industry has become highly professional and corporate, many of them operated by IIT graduates. Services of retired IIT professors and even current IIT students are roped in for lucrative compensation. Flourishing industry There are entrance tests for admission to popular centres; perhaps coaching classes for such tests. A few cities have become famous for such coaching centres and students, often with parents, shifting to those cities for two years. There are associated boarding, lodging and shopping facilities. A whole new flourishing service industry evolves, perhaps unique to India. It is alleged that some coaching centres have deals with some local private schools that admit their students and give mandatory attendance, without attending classes, at a price. The students attend the coaching centres on a full-time basis and the private schools operate as dummies to provide `attendance' and conduct the board examination. It is a win-win situation for both. At a rough estimate of Rs. 25,000 per student per year with about 4 lakh students taking tuition, the annual cumulative turnover of the coaching industry is a staggering Rs. 1,000 crores, totally spent by parents. With this money we may start one new IIT each year! After all, the annual expenditure of an IIT is Rs. 100 crores.

Lack of system Why did we land up in such an extraordinary situation wherein the formal education has almost collapsed? Such a system hardly exists in any developed country. In fact, it is the general feeling of IIT faculty that the students admitted to IITs in recent years and trained through coaching centres are less motivated in learning compared to those of earlier years. I have observed the same in my lecture classes in IIT. The thrill of teaching undergraduates at IITs is diminishing over the years. Many of them tend to be less interested even in their chosen field of engineering. Perhaps an aptitude test is in order. While coaching centres may help them to beat the paper their fundamentals are often found to be weak. A prime reason often put forth for the sorry state is scarcity. For the nearly 2,000 IIT seats, 2 lakh students appear for JEE. Only one out of 100 is selected. Thus JEE is a rejection process and not a selection process. The 18 NITs put together may have about 7,000 seats. Thus seats in premier technical institutions are around 10,000 to which nearly 4 lakh students aspire. Cutthroat competition Among the 2 lakh students taking JEE at least top 10 per cent or 20,000 deserve to be in IIT like institutes. This scarcity has created cutthroat competition. The lure of IIT is such that a large segment of students attempt the JEE more than once and recent data shows that more than 30 per cent of the selected candidates have succeeded in the second attempt. Thus the average age of first year students have gone up. Interestingly as per AICTE statistics nearly 3 lakh engineering seats are available in the country in about 1,200 colleges. In many

colleges there are unfilled branches. Students naturally prefer well-established quality institutions where seats are limited; hence this mad rush! A remedy is to increase quality seats and reduce scarcity. A further revealing fact is that the number seats in our leading institutions are very small compared to similar institutes in developed countries such as MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and UMIST. It seems China wants to have 100 IIT-like institutions! Why not India? Quality of questions Although I do not have valid proof, it is generally felt that question papers are getting tougher over the years aimed at elimination, necessitating extra coaching over and above preparation for the board examination. Further, I have heard that due to popular pressure, quality of syllabus and testing in the board exams has been diluted over the years. Question papers in board examinations tend to be easy, scoring, non-challenging, and straightforward with bright students scoring nearly 100 per cent marks. In States admitting students based only on board examination score, it is observed that lower cut off for some top colleges are as high as 95 per cent. Thus the gap between the standard of entrance test and that of the board tends to increase needing extra training to bridge the same. New Delhi, July 06: With dramatic increase in demand for professionals in almost all spheres and good quality education becoming an avenue to success, private coaching institutes have mushroomed across the country in recent years, becoming an industry worth thousands of croresofrupees.A whole new education industry has grown alongwith the formal education system -- tutorials and coaching classes, distance education and programmes, education consultancies for various courses and study programmes, skills' training centres and career counselling services. Massive investments are supporting this demand that range from pre-primary to research level. There are many institutions and coaching centres that prepare students for taking SAT, GRE and other examinations for studying abroad.

Industry experts say coaching institutions imparting only engineering education to make ways for Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT’s) in lead metropolis collectively earn an annual turnover of Rs 10,000 crore per annum from nearly six lakh aspirants that appear for these exams. "India has over 12 million students enrolled for higher education and the faculty for them is numbering less than 3.5 lakh which is just not adequate," said Sajjan Jindal, president of the associated chambers of commerce and industry of India. Parents are prepared to pay whatever necessary as they realise that it is an investment in their children's future. Several coaching centres cater purely to the demand for the highly-competitive entrance exams, for medical, engineering and management courses. There are specialised coaching classes for the civil services and defence services exams too. Hundreds of institutions and coaching centres in cities across the country prepare students for taking Sat, Gre and other examinations for studying abroad. Tutorials and coaching classes for school students preparing for the board exams have seen maximum growth in recent times. Coaching classes are popular because they are cheaper and more affordable than private tuitions Credibility measures in the offing for MBA coaching industry The coaching industry for MBA aspirants is on the verge of getting more credible. Independent audit of the success claims made by companies may soon become common. Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME), a Rs 40-crore company that draws most of its revenue from coaching sessions for MBA aspirants, plans to appoint an audit firm to certify its success claims. P Viswanath, one of TIME’s promoters, said the company had decided to approach an independent auditor to certify its success claims. While the company has not yet contracted any audit firm to do the same, an internal decision has been taken to go ahead. TIME, for instance, has said that one-third of the students who were taken into the Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs) in 2004 were trained by it. When the claims by the entire industry are put together, the numbers often don’t add up. Viswanath said the broad term of reference to the independent auditor would be to check if TIME’s claims are true. If one company in the industry begins to get its claims audited, the rest of the industry may be forced to follow. The coaching industry for MBA aspirants is not regulated by the government. It’s driven by the market where word-of-mouth publicity has a significant impact on business. About 65 per cent of TIME’s Rs 40 crore revenue earned last fiscal came from the MBA coaching segment. Other segments include the Indian Institute of Technology entrance. Viswanath felt this segment could be a key growth area for the company. MBA-related ,

however, is likely to be the company’s mainstay. On the agenda is a coaching segment for GMAT (exam required to qualify for an MBA course in the US). TIME has set itself a revenue target of Rs 100 crore at the end of fiscal 2007, two-and-a-half times the current revenue. The company’s branch growth is driven by the franchisee model. The network currently covers 90 learning centres across 59 cities. Viswanath said the aim was to increase the number of learning centres to over 100 in a year, provided the company gets the right people to open branches, he added