Throughout one’s life in society, there exist numerous systems to evaluate and validate their skills, expertise and personal growth. From standardised testing to college entrance exams to employee interviews, these systems are made to filter and act as qualificative proof of one’s skill or development. The original purpose of these is usually to recognise if there is something preventing development- in the case of a child’s education- or to help one recognise what levels of expertise they’d need to reach to qualify for employment for a specific job. At some points of time, with cultural and educational shifts, we can see that there are changes with the way these systems are approached and what they in turn become for those participating. One such transformation is when something that acts as a qualifying system becomes an ‘increasingly competitive’ filter. This can be a problem for various reasons.
We can explain this problem through an example: take the JEE entrance exam to publicly funded engineering colleges across India. An exam that has a 1 to 2 per cent admittance rate and the JEE Advanced with an approximate 0.5% admittance rate. The reason it’s so difficult to get in is not only because of the low number of admitted students but the large number of people writing the test and the incredibly high difficulty level of the test. Compared to entrance tests around the world, the JEE stands on a much higher difficulty level than most for the average high school student. This has led to incredibly inequitable fallout, with students who don’t have access to cram schools (also known as coaching centers) being unable to compete in the slightest against others. This has also hurt those with access as well, with a large culture dominant around losing one’s extracurriculars, sports, and additional activities for the sake of allotting larger amounts of time for the exam.
There are likely many other instances of inflated competition around the world for things that are incredibly important for the livelihoods of many. What we notice is that this high drive of competition, instead of being able to identify those that are qualified, gamified the method of achieving the qualification.
The essence of most games is very simple, you spend more time on them and eventually, you will reap rewards with that time spent(given that you’re playing according to how the game wants you to play).
This means that unless you do specific things that the ‘game’ (which is the qualificative system) wants, you will eventually lose out despite having alternative things you can provide to achieve qualification in the eyes of an interviewer.
A good question to ask here is why does this happen?
Ironically, the main reason this accessibility issue occurs is due to something that provided greater access in the first place. The internet radically exposed what interviewers look for in interviewers. Likewise, a number of academies and schools have risen all over India for the purpose of preparing students for entrance exams, usually accessible enough for students belonging to the middle class.
With the rise of greater accessibility to information of what interviews and exams have, the tests instead needed to become harder to justify acceptance rates and increase the bar of qualification. But what many don’t realise is that these access granting mechanisms have limited the way people can access things instead.
And that lets us understand that as a result of large numbers of people trying to compete and game the systems, the game becomes close to unbeatable.
This can lead us to the idea of how even when we have an increase in accessibility to information and resources, this can often worsen the root of the issue- the failure of competition.
We need to recognise why we have competition. For the most part, we have competitive events for the purpose of showcasing extraordinary human talent(as in the case of the Olympics) or attempting to entertain large audiences or both.
But this does not apply to these exams or tests and is rather a resultant factor of multiple events.
In cases where something becomes labelled as ‘competitive’, it probably means that whatever was originally a form of showcasing qualificative proof has become oversaturated in participation and rigged towards incredibly specific metrics.
The reason this is problematic is that it hurts those who inherently don’t have access to building up the specific metrics. Experienced developers who are returning to the workspace may not be able to compete with graduates who train to ace these tests, despite both in worst-case scenarios having similar skills. Students who don’t have access or have different skills (that remain within the domain of qualification) will be unable to participate entirely.
This ends up skewing the ways people learn and grow their skills. The scope of developing oneself dramatically reduces to a small number of things. This harms the way we learn and develop skills for career and life. This discourages students and applicants to do anything new or out of the scope of their competition due to its inflation - damaging their ability to take interest in these things in the future.
This, moreover, inculcates the idea that life is a big game with a large set of premade requirements and goals and not controllable by one for their own. Though this is true to some extent, it is harmful when it controls every aspect of one’s life, being unable to explore and learn something because it is seen as ineffective for said competition.
This can also arguably be why we attribute a large loss of interest in research, development and growth of technology and writing because competitive systems cannot easily compare them, and thus often leave them out as a metric of measure.
What we can make out of this is that a qualificative system that becomes increasingly competitive shows early signs of a broken system that no longer serves its original purpose. They end up limiting, demotivating and preventing participants to develop- which can be devastating in cases when these systems are a large deciding factor for one’s livelihood. As shown above, they are indeed symptomatic of a larger issue with regards to how a qualificative system tests participants and shows that larger cultural and systemic shifts are necessary to break out of this state of failure.
How do we prevent this?
We need to recognise when systems meant for qualification become ‘gamed’ and obvious for participants. When the numbers and resources become too large, instead of increasing the difficulty of the original system, one would have to change the fundamental method of qualification. This may sound hard but in practice, companies, universities, and similar organizations are usually large enough with the resources to deal with the logistics to deal with large participation- thus they would most likely have the ability to create and provide alternative methods of qualification. Institutions need to be held responsible for creating these conundrums and inherent issues as a result of their stalling to change systems with inherently competitive workings.
With this information, it may allow us to consider that growing competition is a symptom of a much larger issue for important qualificative systems.
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