Need for an Engineering Exit Exam in India

Those who have been following the education news in India would have noticed that with increasing regularity there is a talk of a common entrance test and a common exit test (or a common entrance test for the next level). This has already been implemented for all central universities (CUET-UG and CUET-PG). For medical, we have NEET as a common entrance test, NEXT is being mulled as a common exit exam and we will have NEET-PG for PG admissions in medicine and surgery, if my understanding is right. For engineering, we already have GATE that is literally a "gate" for all public sector jobs and higher education. The only thing that is remaining and highly required is a common exit exam for engineering. Something of this nature is highly needed and a lot of discussions have started around this topic, albeit informally. Of course, to accommodate students who will fail the exit exam, multiple exit options have to be provided such that they can leave midway or transfer to other colleges. Both are already features of the New Education Policy: academic bank of credits and multiple-exit options. Hence, I would like to beseech the government to focus on creating an engineering exit exam because it is a great idea, of course in my humble professional opinion. This in no way reflects the views of my organization, IIT Delhi.

Let us first understand the basic question that underlies this entire discussion.

Can high schools, school boards, and colleges be entrusted to create quality graduates if they are left on their own?

The answer is a resounding NO in a developing country like India. Let us analyze this sector by sector. High school boards outcompeted each other till all of them peaked at 100%. Look at these stats for 2021: 99.37% pass rate in class XII for a certain large board, 100% marks in English and Hindi, roughly 20,000 students getting more than 95% in a top national school board and 90,000 getting more than 90% out of 1.3 million students (more than a 100% increase as compared to 2016). The statistics for state boards are even more egregious and marks in class 12 are raining from all angles. Cut-offs rose to 100% in major central universities and still there were more students with perfect scores than available seats!!! All of this happened in the backdrop of Indian 15-year olds getting placed at the very bottom of the PISA ranking (standardized international test for teenagers): 72nd out of 73 participating countries. In such a scenario, CUET (Common University Entrance Test) was definitely due and to ensure that bachelors programs do their job, CUET-PG was also required.

Same was the case with doctors because medical colleges started mushrooming throughout the country and there was absolutely no quality control, whatsoever. Parents started paying crores for donation seats (also known as management quota seats). Finally, the Supreme Court had to step in and sanctify the NEET tests. This has brought the situation under control to some extent.

Next in line is engineering. We graduate about 1.5 million (15 lakh) engineers per year, which is more than what China does. With regards to the quality of the graduates, less the said the better. In our PG interviews, we always ask CS and EE students (who have ultra-high GATE scores) about the total number of lines of code they have written in their life. The numbers never exceed 500 lines. That is all that you need to do to get a CS or EE B.Tech in India. Most students don't even cross the 50-line mark. In India, engineering students don't read any books and they seldom study (in a previous post I had quantified this number, less than 12 hours per semester). Most CS graduates, even from top colleges, cannot even prove that the bubble sort algorithm sorts correctly. In fact, most don't even know that proving a theorem by considering a few examples is not a valid proof technique. Things are bad, very bad, very very bad. Now, if you add AI to the mix, you have the recipe for a perfect storm. Faculty, who are in desperate need for publications, look at AI-based Python libraries as their sole savior. Go to any engineering college in the country barring the top few IITs, you will find the EE and CS departments to be almost 100% AI/ML, where everybody does the same AI thing, which is tantamount to nothing in real terms. You will not find anything that is "serious theory" or "serious practice". In fact, there is a unique Indian word for what goes on in our colleges, it is called "soft computing". Interpret that anyway you want, it is not in the interest of the country at all.

There is more bad news. Out of these 1.5 million, roughly 2/3rds of the graduates are in CS and synonymous fields (IT, Computer Engineering, etc.). In fact, in some autonomous universities they have roughly 15 CS disciplines: CS, CSE, CS+IT, CS+IoT, CS+AI, CS+ML, CS+blockchain, CS+cybersecurity, CS+VLSI, CS+5G, CS+mechatronics, you name it, it is there. This has effectively sucked away all engineering talent from other disciplines that are just going vacant. In fact, I recently heard of a case where the mechanical and chemical engineering programs were merged because individually they had very few students (in a good private university). Together, "Chemomechanical" or "Mechanochemical" has roughly 7 students, just enough to survive !!! Students know that getting a CS degree is very easy and their college controls the grading, hence, why not get one. Students in private colleges and sadly many government colleges are basically "business class customers", as put by a student that I was recently having a discussion with. They don't fail and all back papers ultimately get taken care off. How many students have you heard of who left engineering because they couldn't complete all the courses? I have not heard of anybody barring a few who had health problems. In developed countries, the dropout rates can be as high as 40% (as in the US).

My sincere prayer to all the decision makers of the country is to put an end to this menace. The only way to solve this is to have some kind of an engineering exit exam that grants a time-lapsing "engineering license". This will need to be renewed periodically as is the case in many other countries (to different degrees). Please note that a bad doctor can kill one person at a time, but a bad engineer can kill dozens. Think about the engineer who designs the plane you are flying in or the bridge that takes you from home to office everyday.