Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students - India

2008-09-30

Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students - India

This report reminds me the similar thing happened in China.

KOTA, India — Hoping to boost his chances of getting into a top college, Rohit Agarwal quit his high school and left home.

The 16-year-old moved from the far northeast corner of India in June, with two suitcases and a shoulder bag. He took a two-hour flight and a six-hour train ride to the dusty town of Kota, India’s cram-school capital.

More than 40,000 students show up in the arid state of Rajasthan every year, looking to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools here. These intensive programs, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams. In Kota, most of the schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota’s cramming regimen.

“If we stayed at home, we just wouldn’t be able to study enough,” says Mr. Agarwal as he takes a break from lessons. “If you don’t study hard, you won’t get admission.”

Today, he starts studying at 7 a.m., works on practice problems until noon. After lunch, he goes to class, where he gets the answers to the problems, gets home around 8 p.m. and does homework until midnight.

Kota has become a cram-industry boom town as more Indians seek to send their children to college and economic expansion has far outstripped the increase in college placements, making the competition fiercer.

Students study full-time for two years just for one entrance exam, mostly for the IITs but also for other universities and colleges. The rigor has become part of its selling point: As Kota’s reputation for success has spread, more young hopefuls have flocked to the city.

Vinod Kumar Bansal

“At first, around eight of us studied around my dining-room table. Then I added a few stools to make it 12, then I added a foot to each side of the table,” says Vinod Kumar Bansal, who is credited with starting the cram-school craze when he began tutoring students in the 1980s. He went on to found Bansal Classes, the city’s first cram school, called “coaching institutes” here.

It all started because Mr. Bansal grew ill. He was working in a chemicals factory when he started having trouble climbing steps; he later discovered he had muscular dystrophy, a hereditary muscle disease for which there is no cure. “My plan was to become a chief engineer of the plant or a general manager but things went in a different direction,” he says.

A few of his early students got into an IIT and word spread. Parents in Kota, and then beyond, started asking for his help. In 1991, he started a school, Bansal Classes. He initiated an entrance exam for his own school to identify the brightest prospects for IIT success.

He developed an intensive study system that bombards students with test questions for nine hours a day for two years. They only teach what is on the IIT exams — mathematics, physics and chemistry.

Now, Bansal Classes’ 17,000 students study six days a week. One Sunday a month, they have a six-hour test which is set up just like the IIT exam. After two years, students have taken the mock test more than 20 times.

The course of classes costs up to $1,500 a year, a hefty price for many Indian families. But the payoff can be huge: An IIT degree vaults a graduate into the global elite. Graduates include Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., and Arun Sarin, former chief executive of Vodafone Group PLC, the U.K.-based phone company. More than 1,500 Bansal Classes students got into IIT in the academic year that started in July.

Last year, Bansal Classes opened a new, bigger campus that is in better condition than some IITs and is fully wheelchair accessible for Mr. Bansal, who still teaches up to five classes a day. Girls represent 13% of the students, a percentage that is climbing. They wear light-blue polo shirts that say, “Bansalite today, IITian tomorrow.” The boys have no uniforms.

The Bansal campus is strangely quiet. Teachers say there are rarely disciplinary problems, except for the occasional student sneaking into a class to repeat it, and a bit of graffiti. Even that is aspirational: The writing on one metal bench says, “Bansalites rock, IIT rocks, Lyf after IIT rox.”

Mr. Bansal, 58, says he is now worth more than $20 million. His mobility has declined to the point where he can barely lift a pen. But he says being in a wheelchair 12 hours a day means he has more time to think of challenging questions for students. “Teaching is my breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he says.

IIT officials have no official opinion on the cram schools. However, some public and private schools have complained that they are losing their brightest students to such programs.

While some parents complain that the coaching classes give students an unfair advantage and an unbalanced education, Bansal teachers say their students aren’t taught enough in regular schooling, so cram courses are needed to help them get into the IITs.

The success of Bansal Classes spawned dozens of imitators, many of them started by Mr. Bansal’s former employees. Some even teach students how to ace the entrance exam to get into Bansal Classes.

Cramming has been the salvation of Kota, an industrial center in the 1970s that then fell on hard times. In the past three years, new malls, restaurants, hotels, Internet cafes and clothing stores began to spring up to serve the 16- and 17-year-old cram kids. Many homeowners have added second and third floors to rent out to students.

Balwan Diwani, manager of Milan Cycle, a bike shop in Kota, says bicycle sales have surged to more than 2,000 a year from fewer than 200 five years ago. Mamta Bansal, no relation to the school founder, quit her job as a maid to start a service to deliver boxed lunches and dinners to 30 students as they study. “We try to make what their mothers would cook for them,” she says. “I have had to learn how to make dishes from Gujarat, the Punjab and southern India.”

Local schools also have benefited: Cram students have to attend regular classes so they can pass their high-school exams and graduate. Some high schools have early morning classes so cram students can finish early and move on to cramming.

“There used to be a lot of hooliganism and goons,” says Pradeep Singh Gour, director of the Lawrence and Mayo Public School in Kota. “Now the entire city is like a university campus.”

Mr. Agarwal, the student from the northeast, says that if he gets into IIT, he would like to study aeronautical engineering and eventually work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the U.S. One of his cousins used his IIT degree to get a high-paying job working for Merrill Lynch & Co. in Tokyo.

He got average scores on recent practice exams, though, which he knows will not be good enough. “IITs seats are limited but boys trying to get in are unlimited,” he says.

Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com

Rating: 4.0/10 (3 votes cast)

一位认识的朋友－金雯（哥伦比亚大学泄漏试题事件跟踪）金雯是以前在大学时候的同学，其实不是同一个专业，也是因为前女友的关系认识的。感觉金雯同学是那种特别用功，成绩特别出类拔萃的女生。印象里面不太喜欢社交，但是记性出奇得好。在复旦外文系是大有名气。很意外，这次的事情居然出现在她身上。我想她应该不是出于本意的。真的不希望她的前途因为这件事情而夭折。记得2000年，她以非常优异的成绩进入西北大学攻读比较文学的博士学位，而今正开始自己的教学研究。进入常春藤名校教书的中国人确实不容易啊，真是有点可惜了。道路漫长啊，这件事情也不得不给各位已经或以后将要走上科研或者教学这条道路的朋友们提个醒啊。不论从事什么职业，大家都要小心为之啊。还是希望金雯能够从这关挺过来。WEN JIN Information Title: Assistant Professor of English and Comparative...
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