| Monday, 16 January 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
It’s almost midnight for Aarya. She’s awake, and worried. On WhatsApp, she tells me that the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)—for admission into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and a few other public engineering colleges—is only a few weeks away. This is nerve-wracking enough, but Aarya has bigger problems.
“There are hardly 15 days between the JEE and my board exams. I think I’ll just focus on JEE right now and then worry about the boards,” she tells me nervously, when I ask her about priorities. For someone like me who hates exams, this is literal hell. For Aarya and her cohort though, it’s plain tough luck.
Since 20 December 2023, there’s been a massive social media effort to get the next JEE postponed. This protest meme, in particular, cracked me up.
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Really though, it’s no laughing matter. Most students in India, post high school, find themselves on an endlessly looping conveyor belt of competitive exams. To throw the life-altering Board Exams into the mix at the same time just seems cruel.
The scheduling issue is bad enough, but it wouldn’t have been a “big deal” says Aarya, had a certain pre-pandemic clause not reared its head again just two weeks before the JEE.
