I'm not from India, but the country where I'm from also has universities with highly competitive admission exams. The "crazy tough exams that determine your life" thing is a very specific form of tunnel vision that does actually happen in some upper middle class families. The context is that in the elite schools, admissions are entirely about stack ranking in the entrance exam. You can't "buy" your way into an elite school by showing off extensive extracurricular achievements like you can do for an American Ivy League.
So STEM admissions at elite schools (especially medicine and engineering) are indeed very competitive and there are upper middle class families who do think that nothing short of entering these schools is good enough. While 11 years is pretty hardcore, trying for 2, 3 or even 4 years is not uncommon at all. One of my cousins tried for medicine for such schools several times. People that fail admission exams will often not settle for safety schools; these are considered completely worthless in the eyes of someone aiming for elite schools. Instead, they enroll in cram schools to try again the following year. This is pretty normalized, it's even expected that you'd do that after your first fail.
The exact method of cheating doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that cheating using electronics does happen and has happened since forever. It was already a thing twenty years ago when I was going through admission exams. Schools have always had measures against cheating. In my country in the 90s, they were pretty low tech (e.g. enforcing no cell phones), but I hear some places in China now have some seriously over-the-top anti-cheating mechanisms like signal jamming.
I went to a state school in a country where the only way in to university is by taking a test (this was in the early 00's), so I went to one of these cram schools after I finished high school. The cram school was focused on students of lower income families who would otherwise not have the means to attend a more prestigious one, and I remember in the inauguration ceremony for my year's class, one of their former students was invited to give a speech.
Her story was that after four years trying to get into medical school (i.e. four years attending the same cram school), she was given a tuition scholarship to a more prestigious cram school for her fifth year, and then she finally passed the test.
The thing is, this wasn't even an elite school -- it was just the only federal (state-funded) medical school in our state. The fact that the students' only way in was by taking the exam -- extracurriculars were not taken into account there also -- only made it even more of an _achievement_ for you to actually get in, especially if you were not from an upper middle class family.
IMHO the solution is probably to de-emphasize the metric. Class bottlenecks are probably bad. They’ll always happen, but it shouldn’t be the only route to a good life.
My country was like that: solely focusing on one entrance exam to determine your life.
Finally education reform happened and extensive extracurricular achievements are now taken into consideration.
Now those extracurricular achievements are thoroughly gamed. Helping in homeless kitchen, beach cleanup, book club president, awards at science fair, whatever, you name it, everyone is doing everything now. (mostly richer kids have more help though)
So the kids after reform nowadays, they not only have to prepare for a huge exam, but also find time to do all those extensive activities. Some would even miss the old days where they only have to carefully prep for one exam.
> Now those extracurricular achievements are thoroughly gamed. [...] (mostly richer kids have more help though)
It’s to be expected.
Any metric can and will be gamed. An acquaintance who teaches biology (lot of rote) told me how grades skyrocketed in his classroom after they switched to online classes. He attributed it to students (a lot of them foreign from China and India) being more comfortable asking questions via email instead of in-classroom due to English being their second (or third!) language. I had a different theory.
I’m not surprised most extracurriculars will be created in order to game the system (ever seen a club where all members are presidents?). At least, maybe the kids will do something else (that they are interested in) for a few hours a week instead of spending those cramming to get fraction of points improvement on testing. I recall someone from such country telling me people told him it was a waste of time learning to program (!!) since that wouldn’t help him answer exam questions a little bit faster than his peers. He, at the time, was envious of US kids that could spend time doing robotics or CS and have it count toward something for college admission.
Yeah, I do see the appeal of variety. It was a breath of fresh air that finally those kids would have some room to do something else.
Just wanna share a ridiculous scene I saw on the street:
A high school kid with his father at a bus stop. The kid got a window wiper and the dad had a bucket filled with water. I overheard that the kid needed to include more activities on his college application, the dad was dead set on making up this fake community service of washing bus stops. The kid was just going along with this. The dad all of a sudden splashed the water onto a pane of glass at the bus stop and asked his kid to hurry up and take the window wiper to pose for a picture. They snapped pictures from several angles and just bounced! That pane of glass was not even cleaned, only it now confusingly sported a splash of water. My face was laughing so hard in my palm.
Sure, the underlying point that exams are really important is true. And it's also true that people try to cheat, and that people retry the same exam several times.
What makes it a tall tale is the over-the-topness of it.
>I'm not from India, but the country where I'm from also has universities with highly competitive admission exams. The "crazy tough exams that determine your life" thing is a very specific form of tunnel vision that does actually happen in some upper middle class families.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I did have to pass tough admission exams to enroll in CS and Math program in University. Medicine and Law School admissions were even tougher.
Things are much more relaxed today, to the point that for some specialties there are no admission exams.
So STEM admissions at elite schools (especially medicine and engineering) are indeed very competitive and there are upper middle class families who do think that nothing short of entering these schools is good enough. While 11 years is pretty hardcore, trying for 2, 3 or even 4 years is not uncommon at all. One of my cousins tried for medicine for such schools several times. People that fail admission exams will often not settle for safety schools; these are considered completely worthless in the eyes of someone aiming for elite schools. Instead, they enroll in cram schools to try again the following year. This is pretty normalized, it's even expected that you'd do that after your first fail.
The exact method of cheating doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that cheating using electronics does happen and has happened since forever. It was already a thing twenty years ago when I was going through admission exams. Schools have always had measures against cheating. In my country in the 90s, they were pretty low tech (e.g. enforcing no cell phones), but I hear some places in China now have some seriously over-the-top anti-cheating mechanisms like signal jamming.