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In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

wired.co.uk

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Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#131

Post by hinkley »

scarface74 wrote: post #125
chongli wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're witnessing is the contradiction between real education (designed for learning) and credentialism. The truth is that the world is facing a massive crunch. Billions of people are struggling to get out of the circumstances they're trapped in. Getting a credential and getting a professional job is seen as one of the only paths out of the mire. People who are desperate have no interest in free thinking. Their…

Credentualisn hasn't gotten so bad that if I see a resume with certifications, I take that as a negative signal when I am interviewing candidates. On the other hand, I've done a few certifications in my day but mostly to force myself To learn something. I usually leave the certifications off of my resume because of the stigma. I will talk about projects that I've done using the technologies.

Credentialism was so bad in the 90's that people did exactly that. It's bound to come around again.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#132

Post by Balgair »

One thing for Westerners to be aware of: In India, your exam scores (SAT-type thingys) are public, very public. They are usually published in a special edition of the local newspaper, in descending order. Meaning that the best kid comes first in a very public way. Couple this with the familial honor system/arranged marriages and I think you'll understand why pressure can be so intense. Even your love-life can be radically changed by these tests.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#133

Post by existencebox »

abraham_s wrote: post #101

An anecdote and a poll. I grew up in India in middle class family where education was considered important. A recurring nightmare (autual dream I see during sleep) I see even in my adulthood is about me about to take an exam and not being prepared for it. I do not see this nightmare often but I still remember it since the amount of panic I feel when I see it. I discussed with my wife and she also have these nightmare…

American also born to an education-focused set of parents.

I've been out of school well over a decade and still have those nightmares. Usually correlates with work-stress for me now, but at least once or twice a year I wake up terrified out of a dream where I'm walking around my highschool (always highschool, never college, oddly, despite my college courses being MUCH harder; I think because the artificial stakes and utter lack of autonomy) trying to find the classroom for some test I didn't realize I had.

I had this same conversation with my wife recently as well. It still blows me away that I'm hard pressed to think of situations where I felt as stressed/panicked as I was in parts of highschool, and I've not shirked challenges by any means. I both respect and would not want to be a kid growing up nowadays.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#134

Post by Kluny »

osrec wrote: post #82

India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating schemes are commonly devised by large groups of people, and the ingenuity involved is often quite remarkable and creative. I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: pa…

They seem efficient and ingenious. It's clear that they're optimizing for their incentives. They're incentivized to pass the test, so they come up with these brilliant schemes for cheating. I can't even get three friends to agree on a place to have lunch, how much organization, skill, and leadership does it take to cook up a class-wide cheating scheme? How valuable would that skill be in the workplace?

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#135

Post by ehsanu1 »

ieuan wrote: post #63
rc_hadoken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that hard to teach..I mean..its the alphabet..Excuse my possibly ignorant questioning.

Depends on the pupil. I'm dyspraxic and never learnt the alphabet. It hasn't affected my life or career. Not sure what use it would be to me.

Not sure if troll, but giving the benefit of the doubt...

You are clearly posting a comment comprised of letters of the alphabet. How would one do so without knowing the alphabet, assuming you typed it out rather than dictated it. And well, you also read the original reply. So are you having all that dictated for you? Or are you implying the reading/writing does not require knowing the alphabet (which is difficult to believe, but who knows)?

About the use of an alphabet, have you used a dictionary or any other system that is alphabetically ordered?

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#136

Post by jaequery »

Surprised Korea wasnt mentioned, I believe they have the highest suical rates if Im not mistaken. The kids starting from elementary start school at 7am and comes back home around midnight. Which is really gross and atrocious to hear, almost as bad as labor camps if you ask me.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#137

Post by q12we34rt5 »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #87
osrec wrote: post #82

India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating schemes are commonly devised by large groups of people, and the ingenuity involved is often quite remarkable and creative. I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: pa…

Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA.

>Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA.

>the USA.

>USA

Yes, of course. As always and forever. It is really all about the USA. And Americans. Please tell us more about where you live. As we all know, the USA is so much more interesting than the subject of the article. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the USA whatsoever. But that's boring. So, why don't you take the floor and tell us about what we're really all here to discuss. The USA.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#138

Post by sheepmullet »

osrec wrote: post #95
110011 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly c…

Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India, where your government leaves you pretty much to fend for yourself? If that's what you're suggesting, I disagree.

> Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India

I think pressure and poverty are not as highly coupled as you suggest.

Many of the students in this article who are committing suicide come from well off families.

On the other hand the majority of Indians are not facing such high levels of pressure despite facing far higher levels of poverty.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#139

Post by tluyben2 »

osrec wrote: post #95
110011 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly c…

Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India, where your government leaves you pretty much to fend for yourself? If that's what you're suggesting, I disagree.

Although I disagree as well (Indian youth has a much larger absolute, existential pressure to succeed than the UK youth has), however, mentally people tend to move to their frame of reference. People in most of the EU, if they fail in college they won’t die but many do feel immense and comparable pressure. You can tell them people in India are far worse off so count your blessings, like telling ‘Eat your sprouts, children in Africa are dying’, but that cannot really sway a young, stressed mindset. Anecdotal but a family member committed suicide because of this very pressure in an EU country with all the safety nets; he could not do as well as his friends in uni and the pressure got to him.

Re: In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

#140

Post by afarrell »

ieuan wrote: post #63
rc_hadoken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that hard to teach..I mean..its the alphabet..Excuse my possibly ignorant questioning.

Depends on the pupil. I'm dyspraxic and never learnt the alphabet. It hasn't affected my life or career. Not sure what use it would be to me.

> never learnt the alphabet

By this, do you mean that you can't read? Or you can't remember the ordering of the letters? Or that you can recognize whole words but not as being made up of individual letters?

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