"Papa I want to be a doctor" - Anandita Makkar

"If you judge a fish by its abilities to climb a tree, it will waste its whole life thinking it’s a fool"

We have heard this line thousands of times in respect to standardised testing for college admissions yet we never see any change in the way college admissions take place.

'Papa I want to be a doctor’, said a 13 year old with hope in her eyes. Her dad’s eyes gleamed with happiness imagining his daughter in a white coat, treating patients and saving lives. Who would have known that a small line with immense hope would have changed the next 5 years of that girl's life along with her family? Listening to different peoples’ advice, who had no relation with the healthcare field, the teenage girl along with her father's support entered a NEET coaching at the start of the fresh year. After the first few weeks in the coaching institute, the girl realises it is nowhere easy to clear NEET. The feelings slowly shifted from dreams of medical school to nightmares of not being able to clear NEET. While her friends were busy celebrating each other's birthday she could hardly get any time out of her coaching classes. She sulks in her room daily not having the courage to tell her parents that she is scared and is thinking of giving up, but then she remembers the day she thought she wanted to be a doctor, so, she bottles all of it up inside her. All her jealousy of seeing her friends enjoying, her coaching mates scoring higher than her she just focuses on one thing that is expected from her, that is scoring good in NEET. Frustrated, angry, depressed and slightly hopeful she kept it all inside thinking that in just a few years she will be in a medical school if only she cleared NEET.

The girl mentioned above is actually so many of us, with our heads always in the books and a fear of not being able to score good in NEET, forgetting the fact that do we really want so much pressure and mental distress on us? For Indian teenagers, the pressure to excel in a country of 1.3 billion people is immense, No matter how much we say that exam results do not matter, at the end a single sheet of paper does decide our future, but should it? No. Stress happens not because of the exam but the stakes associated with it. If we reduce the stakes, automatically the stress will be reduced. So multiple exams or dimensions, each with lesser stakes, are so much better for stress management than a single exam with huge stakes. There is

another problem with a common exam. The exam is sorting you based on your preparedness in one dimension. A single test is taking away the most important component i.e. celebrating the beauty of variations, while some people are busy seeking experiences and becoming skillful others might be sacrificing so many things just to get good marks. People are not identical and hence one student may excel in one field whereas the other student would pass with flying colours in some other subject! So is it not about being unfair to most students since most students’ capabilities and interests do not align with any one particular test.

From the admission process of different countries like the USA and UK who have the best universities we can see how equal importance is given to extracurricular activities and scores. Not only this, a lot of universities like NYU and SUNY do not look at standardised testing for admissions, showing that universities understand not to judge a student just by their test scores. We always run after trends of western culture, adopting things that they do, but then why are we still looking at only NEET or JEE scores to give admissions to professional colleges? Especially with COVID-19 still being a big threat to non-vaccinated people, why are we conditioning students to give these exams if they want to get into a good college? We should adopt methods from different countries and come up with a plan that sees the best mental and physical interest of students. As a student I am sure that having standardised tests for college admissions isn't the best way.