No need to ring alarm bells

First, the good news. With an average score of 42 in the quantitative section of the Graduate Management Admission Test ( GMAT) - used as selection criteria by B-schools across the world - Indian students placed seventh globally, comfortably beating the global average of 37. Now for the bad; Chinese students topped the list, beating the Indians handily. Given the obsession with China in this country, this is likely to cause dark warnings about Chinese students and corporate workforce outdoing their Indian counterparts. But this is a false alarm. Standardised test scores have very little bearing on the actual academic or professional quality of an individual.

To understand what these scores really signify, one could look at Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, a book by Chinese-American academic and author Amy Chua on how Chinese mothers raise successful kids. It is a somewhat alarming account of parental pressure. We have Chua forcing her seven-year-old daughter to practise piano for hours into the night without being allowed to get up for water or go to the bathroom. Or calling her "garbage" for being disrespectful - or throwing a birthday card that her daughter had made for her back and demanding a better one. If this is the traditional Chinese mode of parenting as Chua says, it is too high a price to pay for a few more points on a standardised test.

Just as importantly, such fierce focus on a narrow area of student performance ignores many other skills that are equally useful in academic and professional life. Creativity, cognitive skills, the ability to understand social dynamics and work well with one's peers - these cannot be discounted. And they are picked up through social engagement and flexible academic structures. Little wonder that despite having a far lower average on such tests than either India or China, it is still the US that churns out the largest number of top-notch entrepreneurs and researchers.

(Counterview: From inventing the zero to zero)
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