THE SENSATIONAL POLITICAL COMEBACK OF five-time chief minister J. Jayalalithaa who was in hibernation for eight months after she was convicted by a trial court in Bangalore on September 27, 2014 in a 19-year-old disproportionate assets case and finally acquitted by the Karnataka high court on May 11, has over-shadowed all activity in Tamil Nadu (pop. 72.1 million).
However, the jubilation if any, of educationists in the state is muted because during her four previous stints as chief minister, Jayalalithaa didn™t distinguish herself for raising teaching-learning standards in Tamil Nadu, which until recently was a front-line state in the national war against illiteracy and poverty. Over the past three decades in particular, education standards and learning outcomes in the state™s 52,303 government primary-secondaries, 10,934 private unaided schools affiliated with the Tamil Nadu State Board of School Examinations (TNSBSE) and 538 engineering colleges affiliated with the premier Anna University, have plunged. This has had a disastrous consequence on the competitiveness of Tamil Nadu™s engineering graduates in advanced national entrance exams.
In the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) 2015 ” conducted every year jointly by the blue-chip Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and seven pioneer Indian Institutes of Technology on behalf of the Union HRD ministry for admission into their postgraduate engineering and technology programmes ” although Tamil Nadu is among the top five states in the number of examinees, it is near bottom of the list in terms of success rates of students. Only 4,869 or 6 percent of the 80,903 engineering graduates who wrote the test in Tamil Nadu qualified for admission into postgraduate programmes of these top-ranked institutions ” an abysmal percentage which compares unfavourably with even economically backward states such as Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand whose GATE success rates exceeded 20 percent.
In GATE 2015, Delhi recorded the highest success rate (31.47 percent) countrywide against the national average of 16.84 percent. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, which have the largest number of engineering colleges in the country, recorded an average success rate of only 11 percent.
Informed educationists attribute the poor performance of Tamil Nadu™s engineering graduates in national competitive exams to poor teaching/learning pedagogies at school and college levels, which encourage rote learning rather than cognitive development. According to them the samacheer kalvi or common school curriculum legislated by the DMK government in January 2010, and implemented by the Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK in 2013 in all 52,303 government schools and 10,934 private unaided schools affiliated with TNSBSE, is of substandard quality and is largely responsible for lowering education standards and learning outcomes in the state.
œDuring four years of undergraduate engineering education, the preparation for GATE exam which requires well-developed critical thinking and analysis skills, is highly inadequate in TN™s engineering colleges. Moreover, cultural differences between states prompt engineering graduates in Tamil Nadu to start working immediately after graduation unlike students in Andhra, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh where there is strong motivation to pursue higher education, says Dr. S. Ganesh, professor of business management at IIT-Madras.
According to education analysts, abolition of entrance exams to institutes of professional education (engineering, medicine, dental, pharmacy etc) by the AIADMK government in June 2005, and decreeing Plus II exam scores as the sole criterion for admission into professional colleges, has resulted in engineering graduates from the state having very limited experience of competitive exams which test application and analytical skills. Although public entrance exams were banned to create a level playing field for students in rural Tamil Nadu who don™t have access to coaching centres, this purpose has not been achieved either, given the poor quality of teachers and infrastructure in village secondary schools.
Educationists hope that with Jayalalithaa back as chief minister, she will greenlight the overhaul of state board schools and engineering colleges curriculums. Otherwise Tamil Nadu will continue to languish at the bottom of the heap in national  entrance exams, and its engineers will stagnate in low and mid-level positions in India Inc.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)