How did I survive that?

Whenever I think about the fact that I am in IIT Madras, a top notch engineering institute in the country, I always wonder how I survived through my school education.

I was a Tamil Nadu State Board student right from my class 1 to 12. Why do I hate it so much? Well consider this:

When I came out of the examination hall from my tenth grade Chemistry board Exam, everyone was complaining about an 'out of syllabus' question. But I never realized anything like that in the paper. Then one of my friends told me the question number and it was a question about what ethane gets converted to in some specific setup. I do remember reading about it in the book. Then I checked it out and voila! The book explains what happens to propane. And it is exactly the same for ethane in that case with appropriate extra carbon and hydrogen added. God! How can that be considered as an out of syllabus question? To my surprise, it is mentioned as an out of syllabus question in all newspapers in the first page the very next day! Same story in television news...And the worst part is that it was finally announced that anyone who has attempted that question will get the full marks for that question!

This is how I was supposed to learn physics and chemistry - I have to literally mug the entire book if I need to get a good score. Yes, all that they ask is theory and only theory! We never think about solving problems. Most of the people just mug the entire book without even understanding the concept. I have seen students who can tell the page number and paragraph number given a sentence from the book!

And the story is a little better in mathematics. Yes we have problems in our exams but guess what, they must be only from the books. No change of data even. In the best case, we might have around 5% of the questions which are a bit different from the book problems. Most of the girls in my class can tell the final answer right away without any calculation if I give them a question from the book. ( Sorry girls.No offense! )

Schools makes it even worse. The schools want their kids to be top rankers in the district/state and so they load our days with infinite exams and extra classes. I have to attend classes from morning 7 to evening 7 on weekdays and from 8.30 to 5.30 on weekends. There are schools which are much worse. Some schools with hostel facilities drills the students for about 16 hours a day.

On top of that, there are many schools which never teach 11 grade syllabus. So for two years the students are supposed to literally mug the 12 grade books with no knowledge of the prerequisites!

Well, the worst part is not done yet: There is no entrance examination for admission to colleges. Only your 12th grade marks matters. This means the success formula is straight forward: Join a school with hostel facility in your 11th grade. MUG the 12th grade books for two years. Get good marks and there you go! You are a mechanical engineering student without knowing Newton's laws of motion! ( that is covered in 11 th grade! ). You are Computer Engineer student without knowing how to write a program which can generate the first few prime numbers! And you are a medical student with no clue about human anatomy!

The competition to get high marks is immensely huge. So if you forget the exact wordings from the book for some topic in the examination hall, you can forget getting into a good college. The madness so bad that even if you get full score in all the subjects, you may still not make into the top branch in top college since the number of people who get a perfect score is usually more than the number of seats available!

Seriously, how did I survive that? That is real crap! I wish this scenario changes soon enough. To be honest, most of my school time is a total waste if I think about it now. All that matters now is how much I understood my subjects. Guys who are struck like me now! Wake up! This education is of no use to you in any way!