Published: 13th February 2019
ThinkEdu Live: Can you crack UPSC with just your school curriculum and without your friendly neighbourhood coaching centre?
"But coaching centres provide an instant tablet that they can pop in", said Prasanth Nair
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The three panelists at the Conclave discussed the need for coaching centres
The coaching class preparation model assumes a one-size-fits-all solution towards cracking the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) examinations
He was speaking at a panel discussion on 'Can you crack UPSC with just your school curriculum and without your friendly neighbourhood coaching centre?' "The exams are immensely competitive. Civil service exams, like most competitive exams in the country, do not work on selection, but on de-selection. But coaching centres provide an instant tablet that they can pop in," he said.
Stating that coaching centres, apart from providing aspirants with an easily consumable form of information and knowledge, primarily give access to a competent peer. "An aspirant who has studied Law could be weak in Statistics and a Mathematics graduate may have no clue about Law. At coaching centres, if you network well and stumble on the right peer, it increases the chances of cracking UPSC drastically," he said.
Even as coaching centres provide simplified content for aspirants, the material needed to prepare for UPSC is available in public, said Israel Jebasingh, former IAS officer, who chaired the discussion. "It takes a lot more reading than going through coaching, but it is definitely possible," he said.
Also speaking at the panel discussion, Anita Karwal, Chairperson of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), said that the craze to sign up for coaching has pushed many students to give less importance to school education. "We have hundreds of CBSE students on paper, when, in
reality, they are taking up coaching classes at Kota or Nagpur," she said, adding that the rate of death by suicide among such students are increasing as they spend a significant amount of their school life aspiring to crack highly competitive exams.
She also said that in addition to setting a curriculum and syllabus that will empower students to crack these exams, the school education system should train teachers to support students enough.