Missing piece in JEE preparation: A culture of care

Adolescents seek and need a sense of belonging — supportive relationships and learning communities that signal, especially to those under threat of self-doubt, that 'people like me can do well here’

Over the past weeks, the newspapers celebrated the success of top-rankers of the JEE (Main). They will go on, deservedly, to India’s top colleges and alter the trajectory of their families. Hidden within this success is a massive cost — to the self-worth, learning behaviours and life outcomes of the over 1 million students who did not clear the test.

The majority of these students spent lakhs of rupees over multiple years on coaching classes. Along the way, they learnt that their success depended almost entirely on their intelligence and hard work. Even those that did clear the exam enter college with the same damaging belief — that their ability is fixed and these outcomes define their worth.

The prevailing dogma is that the path to success is to submit to a high-pressure preparation programme. Research suggests this couldn’t be farther from the truth. A paper by Carol Dweck, Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen argues that academic tenacity rests on psychological pillars — beliefs about whether intelligence can grow, a sense of purpose, social belonging, and self-regulation. These are shaped by environments where high standards are paired with an achievable path, scaffolding, and care.

Most classrooms, especially coaching classes, emphasise exactly the opposite. Consider just one component: Growth mindset. The typical JEE candidate spends two years being categorised — batch A, B, C or D — absorbing the message: Your “rank” is your identity. Growth mindset thrives when teachers set high but achievable standards, and when students can see a credible path from where they are to where they need to be. Instead, too many students live inside “IIT or bust” cultures — years of high stakes, high spend, and low psychological safety.

Students need scaffolding through mentorship that helps them interpret setbacks productively. Yet, most receive the opposite: Reprimands, shaming and punishment tasks. Adolescents seek and need a sense of belonging. When you’re moved to a “lower” batch for one bad test and assigned a new rank each week, this becomes incredibly hard. If this is all true, why are coaching classes so successful? Are they? The success rates of coaching institutes are the same as the national averages. What leads to this perception is the full-page ads of JEE top rankers. None of what I have written applies to toppers who receive constant support.

Creating a culture of care is not the same as setting low standards. It is also not telling everyone (falsely) that they can succeed. It is one of excellence by supporting young people in making (sometimes slow) thoughtful progress. We need to start holding institutions accountable not just for the rank they helped students secure but also for the process they followed to get them there.

The writer is co-founder and co-CEO of Avanti Fellows