What they actually do at JEE/NEET “Coaching Centres” — The Reality
FIITJEE, Vibrant, Aakash, Narayana, Allen and Resonance. These are Businesses who earn a huge amount of money from crazy parents who think these 23 colleges are everything.
Before I tell you how these so called, “Institutes” work, Just to clear things up, I’m a 12th grader who’s also a student of Resonance and I’m gonna appear for this stupid entrance as well. No biggie but I’m doing it on my own accord, not because of peer pressure or anything like that.
So, here’s the deal. JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) is known as the world’s toughest exam and about 1.5 Million teens around the age of 17–19 take this exam every year and what for, you ask? a meager 12 thousand seats at max in good colleges, NOT legendary ones like MIT or Harvard.
Definitely India does have better colleges to offer but here, the Baby Boomers only care about the Brand built and the Societal status their child gets once they get into this college after struggling for two to seven years of their most precious Childhood/Teen Life into doing nothing but stare at books that are predominantly filled with utter Useless content ranging from solutions to find the angle at which a whirlpool of water is created when you mix a spoon around in a glass of juice (Mind you, this is actually a JEE Advanced question) to calculating some other completely useless stuff that will get you absolutely nowhere in life and ignore their social lives completely to get into the IITs and the NITs come a close second, slightly easier to get into due to just getting through the first stage which was also insanely difficult this year (2018).
The whole point of an entrance exam is to get a certain cream of the crop, but that cream is something that should inherently exist in the crop, not cultivated by mugging up stuff and by studying them from muggers that had already got their cream from someone else back in their time and so on.
JEE isn’t something like that. It’s extremely, extremely rare to get into an IIT without these so called “Coaching Centers”
This has lead into a MASSIVE informally known “Coaching Industry” in our country (See Business Of Private Tutorials In India Now A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry in businessworld.in)
So here’s the thing. These people offer mostly two different “classes”. An “Integrated” class which states they cover both the NCERT recommended syllabus along with the extra “tidbits” that would be asked in the exam but is actually not in the school syllabi but the truth is that they ignore everything NCERT related and just go with questions, questions and questions and teach the students actually nothing regarding the concepts involved in that particular topic. This is what’s exactly happening to me right now but, unfortunately, I have no choice. Now, at least this one’s okay when compared to the “Classroom Programs”.
So these so called “Classroom Program” students actually don’t go to school at all. They just get enrolled in a dummy school that’s already regularly being bribed by the coaching institutes to make their attendances “flexible” accordingly to their schedule.
You might think, “Okay, so definitely spending so much time in classes for this exam’s gotta make things easy for them and it’s probably worth it”. But that’s totally not the case, the lecturers (I’m never gonna call them teachers, they don’t teach at all.) always quote “Self study is the key to cracking the JEE” *it actually rhymes lol*
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Trust me, my physics lecturer constantly tells us students to study for “at least” TWELVE HOURS. Twelve fucking hours. And they casually even tell us to sleep less than four hours “cause it’s enough”.
About these lecturers. So, after finally cracking this goddamned exam, the graduate thinks, “Okay, so since I’ve pretty much wasted my whole life into this exam and have learnt nothing at all, why not ruin the forthcoming generations and make easy money by repeating the same drony speeches my lecturers gave me back in the day.” and they go join in a coaching institute.
So, here in India, a teacher MUST have at least a Bachelors degree in Education to be eligible for teaching high school, now these coaching centres? Nah, you’ve cracked the exam? Then yeah sure, why not? Just hop in and we’ll pay you a couple lacs, we’ll also set you up with a nice flat along with your fellow lecturers, you got AC classrooms and plenty of food and nothing to worry about, 3 hours a day of work and off you go.
What can you expect to “learn” from these guys? You actually have way better communication skills and knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary than they do. Pathetic, isn’t it.
And don’t even get me started on “life” at Kota. That’s a whole another story.
The exact same applies to NEET coaching centers as well. No change.
And it’s all definitely not worth it. That’s saved for my next article.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, the man who knew the infinity, said, “An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought…”
“I don’t think, learning facts is education. one should learn ideas, which are far more important in life. It’s not facts, but ideas, that matter.” — Albert Einstein.
“Knowledge comes from probing the meaning behind the facts. Knowledge is gained by testing facts through practice.
Theory should be something that comes from practice and should be that which enriches it.” — Jessenth Ebenezer.
What are we taught then? In School?…
