<p>For a long time, I've been meaning to post my perspective of the Indian education system. Well, here goes the first part.</p>
<p>PART I - SCHOOL</p>
<p>There are 3 education boards in India - ICSE (the board I follow), CBSE, and State Boards (which vary from state to state, but I can only speak about the Tamil Nadu State Board, as it's in my home state). As can be inferred, ICSE and CBSE are the only centralized boards. There are a handful of IB/A-Levels schools in India, and these do not fall victim to my rant.</p>
<p>Now right from kindergarten till class 10, students follow a previously chartered course of study. That's right folks - no picking your courses here. Most of the syllabus emphasizes rote learning and blind memorization of facts without explaining the theories that led to something being formulated. But - get this - people don't care what they learn, as long as they get their marks. (In case you haven't figured, I'm one among those exceptional people who do care about what they learn).</p>
<p>At the end of class 10, there is a public exam which pits you against the rest of the nation. Your performance in this exam is used to place you into one of three 'streams' in 11th grade - science, commerce or humanities. Typically, only students who do well (say get an A grade) in this public exam get to take the science stream.</p>
<p>This is pretty much the only time where you get to choose what you study. But then again, for a person like me who plans to have a future in science but also deeply cares about some of the subjects in humanities...well, it's rather frustrating, to put it lightly.</p>
<p>11th and 12th grade are filled with huge textbooks and some more of that blind learning (it is a little better than what happened previously though). At the end of 12th grade, there's another public exam which is used to place students into universities.</p>
<p>Now, in Tamil Nadu, the State Board syllabus is WAY easier than the ICSE/CBSE syllabus. Needless to say, these students get much higher marks in the public exams (think 99.8%, while the highest mark in the ICSE/CBSE 12th public exam would be about 95%). And there are toooons of these State Board kids who get 95%+. </p>
<p>However, universities don't discriminate between the various boards while offering admissions (EC's don't play a role AT ALL); that is, a student is not evaluated based on which board he studied under, but based on the marks he got in the public exam. Now this, to say the least, is not at all fair on the ICSE and CBSE students. A somewhat equalizing factor is the All India Engineering/Medical Entrance Exam, which a student takes only if he wants to go up North/to some other part of the country to study, but the majority of students choose to stick within their state. A few colleges also have individual entrance exams - but these are in the marginal minority; the majority of colleges still base their decisions on that 1 public exam.</p>
<p>Soooooo yeah, that's my description of schools in India. Part II - universities in India - will be up tomorrow.</p>