Dear Reader,
Hello and welcome to this week’s post. Thank you for subscribing and sticking around. Today we are starting the series on Merit.
The most common refrain against reservations is that it ‘kills’ merit. The most common refrain against its beneficiaries is that they are ‘unmeritorious’.
But what is this merit? How do we define it? How is it measured? And are the above claims about its murder valid?
I think it’s reasonable to define merit as the capability of performing well at any task. With that working definition, we will look at the major contexts in which ‘merit’ is used as a refrain against reservations: cutoff scores for college entrance exams, academic performance in college and professional performance at jobs.
Today, let’s understand cutoff scores.
Cutoff Scores
The only concrete data that I have ever seen from the anti-reservation crowd is them pointing out the cutoff marks of reserved vs. unreserved categories whenever the reserved category cutoff marks are lower than the unreserved category. They assert that only those who cleared the general/unreserved category cutoff marks have the ‘merit’ to be admitted, while the cutoff marks are lowered for the SC/ST/OBC categories by the admissions authorities to let in ‘unmeritorious’ students.
But if that were true, then what explains the cases where the reserved category cutoffs have risen higher than general category cutoffs? For instance, look at the examples captured in the article below:
Why civil services exams in some states have had higher cut-offs for SC/ST & OBC applicants
Excerpt from the article:
In Rajasthan Administrative Service (RAS)-2013 mains examination, the cut-off for the OBC was 381 and 350 for general category applicants.
According to the merit list prepared in March 2019 for the sub-inspector post in Railway Protection Force, the Group A cut-off for OBC category was 95.53 per cent and 94.59 per cent for general category candidates; whereas the Group F cut-off was 87.33 per cent for OBC and 76.99 per cent for general applicants.
In Delhi government’s examination for recruitment as teachers in public schools held in September 2018, the cut-off for SC candidates was fixed at 85.45 per cent while it was 80.96 per cent for the general category.
What is going on here? Did the whole ‘general category’ become ‘unmeritorious’ and ‘underserving’ in the above instances?
Before I explain, I’ll raise another question: why are the cutoff marks for various categories declared only after the exam results come out? If general category cutoff = the minimum eligibility or merit for admission, as anti-reservationists claim, then shouldn’t this cutoff score be known to the examiners as soon as they set the papers, similar to how in schools and colleges state upfront the scores for getting A/B/C grade or First/Second/Third division? What is going on here?
The answer is quite simple: cutoff marks are NOT the same as passing marks. The relationship between cutoff marks and passing marks looks something like this
Any candidate who clears the Passing Marks criterion is qualified. In other words, they have the ‘merit’ to study or work at that institution.
However, all qualified candidates are not admissible, not because of any ‘lack of merit’ on their part but because of a lack of ‘number of seats’. So, the institute uses a simple solution: if it has x number of seats, then it takes the x number of top-scoring eligible candidates to fill its seats. These are the admissible candidates and the scores of the last admissible candidate are called cut-off marks.
Cutoff marks are calculated using three variables:
Passing Marks (common across categories)
No. of seats available (different for each category)
No. of candidates who passed (different for each category)
Of course cutoff numbers are going to be different for different categories! That’s because two out of three variables are different for each category. It’s simple maths.
Rising cutoffs equate to higher number of qualified candidates in a category and less number of seats.
Falling cutoffs equate to increased seats and/or lower number of qualified candidates in a category.
Neither scenario says anything about ‘merit’. No matter what category the candidates are admitted under, they are all qualified.
Anti-reservationists claim that someone who scores higher marks in an entrance exam has higher ‘merit’ than someone who scores lower marks. This claim is ignorant at best, and malicious at worst.
The educational journeys of the candidates before the entrance exams are wildly different. They study at different boards - CBSE, ICSE, IB, State boards, etc. They study in different languages - English medium, Hindi medium, Marathi medium, etc. Some of them go to big coaching institutes in places like Kota, while others take local tuitions in small towns, or get correspondence courses where they have to figure out the material without a teacher’s guidance, or study on their own from the books they can find.
Some have to support their family by working part time, while others are provided all comforts at home so that they can study 12-16 hours without interruption. Some have laptops and noise-cancelling headphones, while others have regular electrical cuts and no computer at home. Some have both parents who are post-graduate, while others are first-generation college entrants.
The sheer diversity of candidates giving entrance exams of any Indian college is mind-boggling, especially when the exams are All-India exams. To erase their different journeys and reduce their performance in the exam to only their intelligence and capability and call it ‘merit’ is disingenuous and cruel. This definition of ‘merit’ criminalizes poverty, lack of resources, lack of good schools, learning in regional languages, and hard work for supporting one’s family, amongst other things.
This is the reason why I always write ‘merit’ within quotes. In a country like India, with such vast diversity and inequality, the concept of judging ‘merit’ of a person based on the results of an entrance exam is laughable. With this standard, the most privileged students will always appear to be the most ‘meritorious’.
The whole idea of reservation is an attempt to address this diversity and inequality. Unless there is equitable access to resources and opportunities for all the sections of society, any talk of ‘merit’ based on a simple criterion like an entrance exam score is meaningless.
I’m not saying that entrance exams and marks are useless. Every institute needs a way to judge its candidates’ knowledge. Written exams are a valid way to do that. They give a good idea of who is ready to enter the institution. But that’s their only utility. They say NOTHING about an individual’s intellectual capacity or their capacity to learn or their work ethic.
With this, I’m concluding the first post on merit. I think I’ve addressed all the relevant points, but if you think I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments.
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Thank you for reading. See you next week.