(written 3 Mar 2021)
"I study in IIT Bombay."
Hearing that one sentence alone would make a lot of Indians feel a sense of awe. Saying it would fill me with pride, almost 4 years ago.
And why shouldn't it? I spent 7 months busting my ass off practicing to do well in JEE. I deserved it.
My journey in IITB has been... interesting, to put it mildly. The diversity combined with the free time led me to some revelations that (among a LOT of other things) replaced my pride with gratitude. This is the focus of this article.
12,00,000. That's the number of students who attempted what is probably the most glorified college entrance exam in India.
11,000. That's how many would be selected. Yes, a selection ratio worse than 1%.
A candidate's performance on the day of the exam depends on a whole host of factors. Factors like preparation could be controlled by them (my philosophical deterministic worldview disagrees, but that's a whole another discussion), while those like their health were outside their control. Let us, for the purpose of this article, use the (admittedly ill-fitting) terms "skill" and "luck" to describe these factors.
Draw a square. As you go from the bottom to the top, your luck increases. As you go from the left to the right, your skill increases. Let's assume that our 12 lakh candidates are spread uniformly over this square. How do we decide how many make it through? We give each candidate a score, that's 95% skill and 5% luck.
In this scenario, a candidate with 100 skill and 0 luck would score the same as a candidate with 94.737 skill and 100 luck. The line joining these two points on the square is what one would call a contour. In a linear case such as this, all contours are parallel lines. Once we choose a cutoff total score, we pick the contour line representing that total and select everyone that falls to its top-right.
Yes, the selected candidates are incredibly skilled. But, they were also lucky. For just about any candidate, you have someone else who is more skilled but performed worse and vice versa. Granted, the effect of luck is much smaller than that of skill, but it is present and it is non-negligible. We have just quantified it in the earlier paragraph.
What's my point with all this? I realise now that I have been lucky in ways I never appreciated before. This luck eventually factored into my selection into an IIT. Others did not have that privilege.
I was, first and foremost, born into a family that encouraged me. I had teachers that taught me well. I have core competencies that align very well with the "default" career path in this country.
The last one, perhaps, is the most mind boggling.
Why do we have a default career path? If everyone was free to choose their career path, we wouldn't have so many people trying to define their self worth by a (metaphorical) piece of paper that's ultimately meaningless to them. We wouldn't have people squandering 6 years of their life pursuing a Bachelor's in Technology even if they're going to work a completely non-technical job. Such people get into IITs and in healthy proportions at that. Imagine their growth had they actually done what they wanted to! Imagine the seats freed up for people that are interested in Engineering. Everyone would have a better life.
So what do we do? I think we can all agree that the less role luck plays, the purer the selection. So we work to create a society where luck is no longer a factor. Unfortunately, a lot of our current action, through ignorance of even the presence of luck, create a world where circumstances beyond a person's control play a larger and larger role in their success. Equality of opportunity is the way to go forward.
One part (among many) of it is need to rethink education as a society. There is nothing shameful about pursuing your interests. I single this problem out because it is the most noticeable from my perspective. There are likely other problems apparent from other perspectives.
Every last one of them needs addressing.
Oh, and the cutoff score for selecting 11k out of 12lc? It corresponds to a line passing through 100 skill and 40 luck.
In a world where luck plays only a 5% role for a very competitive position, the most skilled of us only do slightly better than a coin toss.