Two Years, One Test, 40,000 Students

More than 40,000 students show up in the arid state of Rajasthan every year, looking to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools here. These intensive programs, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams.  In Kota, most of the coaching schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology IIT JEE (Joint Entrance Exam), reports the online edition of Wall Street Journal

The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota’s cramming regimen.

Kota has become a cram-industry boom town as more Indians seek to send their children to college and economic expansion has far outstripped the increase in college placements, making the competition fiercer.

Students study full-time for two years just for one entrance exam, mostly for the IITs but also for other universities and colleges. The rigor has become part of its selling point: As Kota’s reputation for success has spread, more young hopefuls have flocked to the city.

Vinod Kumar Bansal, who is credited with starting the cram-school craze when he began tutoring students in the 1980s. He went on to found Bansal Classes, the city’s first cram school, called “coaching institutes” here.

It all started because Mr. Bansal grew ill. He was working in a chemicals factory when he started having trouble climbing steps; he later discovered he had muscular dystrophy, a hereditary muscle disease for which there is no cure.

He developed an intensive study system that bombards students with test questions for nine hours a day for two years. They only teach what is on the IIT exams — mathematics, physics and chemistry.

Now, Bansal Classes‘ 17,000 students study six days a week. One Sunday a month, they have a six-hour test which is set up just like the IIT exam. After two years, students have taken the mock test more than 20 times. >> Read Complete Story