How Many Exams Are Too Many Exams?

It was a question that perplexed everybody for the longest time—how to design a process for evaluation that would help us identify the brightest of bright minds with the most extraordinary gray matter and the potential to become future leaders.

The team already had had multiple discussions in the past when it was time to select the very first batch of the program back at the beginning of 2021. Those discussions did lead us to a rigorous, definitive process, which helped us shortlist five of the brightest minds at the time from a pool of more than 7000 students through first the National Means cum Merit Scholarship exams and TLI’s internally curated exam structured to gauge kids’ conceptual understanding of mathematics and science.

The year went by—it saw its own stages of progression, of setbacks, of shocks and surprises. Along with the students, we too had our own set of learnings, an important one being that the selection process needed to be refined further. These learnings led us to another set of numerous discussions with the members in-house and experts across the state.

Through a series of intense meet-ups and going back and forth, it was concluded that though the type of exam needed to be changed, the structure revamped, and the number increased, it couldn’t be increased beyond a certain point or it might lead to exam fatigue and probably held the risk of deviating from the actual aim of focusing on learning for learning and not just for exams.

In the end, the team concluded on conducting a series of three internal exams, instead of two, one of which would focus on the conceptual understanding and the thinking ability of the kids. The process is being implemented for selecting kids for 2022’s batch, and we’re excited to share our findings on the same with you. More on it soon!