When 22-year-old Shreyas Sudhaman, ICSE’s best in 2014, went abroad for his undergraduate education in chemical engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas, Austin, he realized that the school did not. had equipped with some key skills.
“I was much more adapted to textbook problems than innovative thinking,” he said. “When I had to do my first-year engineering project with a team, I was unable to clearly communicate my ideas for the project… Writing reports and essays was much more difficult for me than it was for my fellow Americans who are trained to organize information. and present it in a clear way. “
Years after graduation from high school, like Sudhaman, most of the 86 national leaders on the Board, tracked by The Indian Express as part of a four month investigation, They say that while their grades and ranks may have given them an edge, looking back, they now see crucial gaps in their school curriculum and in the way they were taught.
Many of them downplay their scores on the Board exams, but almost all said their school education did not prepare them for what lay ahead.
Pushpraj Shukla, 37, the 1999 ICSE leader, who is currently managing partner for data science at Microsoft in San Francisco, says that increased attention in schools to public speaking and debate could be of great help. “Have the whole class participate in public speaking; not just a select few students. These skills are bigger differentiators in careers than some of the others that schools focus on, ”said Shukla, who moved to the US in 2005 after her BTech Informatics from IIT-Kanpur.
Pushpraj Shukla, ICSE Class 10 topper in 1999. Currently working with Microsoft in San Francisco.
Many toppers say they wish someone at the school had better informed them about available after-school options, loan programs, and helped them with college and career choices; in the absence of which, many of them ended up specializing in conventional disciplines before discovering their real interest.
Janvi Thosani, 26, has a BCom degree from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad and is now a Chartered Accountant. “CA was primarily an elimination pick because it didn’t want to do medicine or engineering. I wish I knew that doing economics is an option, ”he said.
Looking back, she also wanted to know more about undergraduate options outside of her hometown, Mumbai.
“My parents also did their education in Mumbai, so they weren’t aware of the options outside. At school, they only told us about the engineering colleges in the vicinity. If I had known how better the universities in Delhi were, I would have prepared accordingly, ”said the 2010 ICSE national leader.
Janvi Thosani, CA, ICSE Class 10 topper in 2010.
Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal says the new National Education Policy (NEP) “does exactly what these leaders need: a better ecosystem in India.”
“NEP 2020 aims to discourage rote learning, promote creative thinking, and at the same time impart 21st century skills to these toppers,” Pokhriyal said in an email response to The Indian Express.
Gerry Arathoon, executive director and secretary of CISCE – the Board whose curriculum 62 of the top 86 spots featured in this series followed at the school – also says the new NEP is a “unique opportunity” to usher in change. and reforms in school education. “If our former toppers feel that their education was not exposed to other professions or in teaching social-emotional skills, we will analyze all their suggestions and take the opportunity presented by the NEP to make changes,” he told The Indian Express.
Shashi Tharoor, leader of Congress and Minister of State for Human Resource Development (as the Ministry of Education was called until recently) in the previous UPA government, says that change is due to a long time ago. “I have been arguing for some time that our schools should not teach children what to think, but how to think. Encourage them to think outside the box and creatively. Let them ask themselves not just ‘why’ but ‘why not’. The 21st century needs people with well-formed minds, not just full ones, ”he said.
Many of the former also spoke about the need to update the curriculum and change the way content is delivered to students.
Research scientist Karuna Ganesh, 37, acknowledges that her school life prepared her to “work hard, be focused and goal-oriented,” but the curriculum in which she worked hard to “learn by heart” in late the nineties was mostly irrelevant to science.
“I remember memorizing the names of parts of different subtypes of seeds, flowers, etc., but we could not learn the basic principles of modern biology that really explain how life works. The fundamental concepts of DNA, RNA and protein, for example, were completely absent from our school curriculum. I learned about the principles of how cells and organisms work once I went to school in the United States, ”said Ganesh, who led the ICSE exam in 1999, and is now a physician-scientist at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. .
Sixteen years after Ganesh passed his Class 10, the experience that Sougato Chowdhury, 21, who led the ICSE Class 10 exam in 2015, had in school was no different. “The essence of science is to think critically, ask questions, and test possible answers. This was never promoted. We couldn’t even glimpse modern research, some of which is easily explained, but interesting and relevant, ”he said.
Anika Agrawal, 23, the 2013 ICSE top student studying for a master’s degree in marine biology at Texas A&M University, said: “I don’t remember anything I learned in class 10 because it was all short-term memorization. We should have taught ourselves to reason and not charge. “
The former also have a tip for the 2021 batch: the board exam, at the end of the day, is just an exam.
Arkya Chatterjee, 24, who led the ISC Class 12 Board exam in 2015 and is currently enrolled as a PhD student at MIT, presents an analogy to soccer to explain the relevance of the Board exams.
“The final ranking depends on how well you play the different games; neither game is more important than the other. Likewise, no exam has the ability to determine exactly where you end up or how well you are doing in life. But the first game of the league is always special; a good start serves as an indicator of the team’s readiness for the rest of the league. So your board exam is like this first league game. It’s not that champions always win their first game, but most teams that end up doing well in the league start with a good first game. “
Like Chatterjee, more than half of the former, as this research discovered, are abroad today, most of them in the US That, in itself, is not so much a problem as an indicator, they say. The experts.
“At IIT, we are aware of this problem (of students going abroad to study further and then settle there) and this is something that the government and we are trying to address with the Prime Minister’s scholarship,” said the Director. V of IIT-Delhi. Ramgopal Rao. “I think we should encourage bright students to study abroad by funding them through scholarships and then bringing them back to work here. While they will benefit from the export, the country will in turn benefit from their return. China has been doing this for a while, where it sends many students abroad for research and advanced degrees and pays the bill. In this way, (foreign) universities are also interested in receiving these students and the country can benefit from the experience they have acquired abroad, ”he said.
For Manish Sisodia, Minister of Education in the Delhi government who is credited with introducing reforms to change the face of public education in the capital, the high number of migrants abroad is a reminder of the challenge of retaining talent.
“We need to bring in a new ecosystem that not only values talent but also compensates it competitively. We cannot prevent anyone from leaving the country, but what we can do is create adequate opportunities here, ”Sisodia said. “Other than that, I also feel that the selection process in our higher education institutions is orthodox and out of date. It does not recognize potential or talent. It must change and be in line with what some of the best institutions in the world are doing. “
Minister Pokhriyal said the government is already working to retain talent. “A committee constituted under the UGC president regarding ‘Stay in India’ has recently presented its report. This report is primarily concerned with stemming the tide of students who want to study abroad. Now the situation has changed and there are world-class institutions in India, ”he said.
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