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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them, and not by what they can accomplish with the skills they have gained. A degree does not make a competent employee from what I've experienced.

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Yeah but even in US, this whole college education has become a thing in the current times.

Degrees have been used as a filter for many jobs internationally for a while now.

The problem is this: how do you entrust that the right people are getting into any institution (college, jobs, etc). There are two broad approaches: standardized testing vs. application/interviewing. The Western mindset predominantly favours approach #2 in most contexts, with standardized testing being a factor only in college admissions (in my knowledge). Interviews and essays (to continue the college admissions theme) are good ways to get an insight into the mind of the prospective student, but the crux is that they are interpreted subjectively and not objectively. This keeps a window for bias to creep in. Harvard University had instituted standardized entrance exam; they later scrapped it because of those who passed the exam, a large portion were Jews[0]. Standardized testing is an approach to selection that avoids this kind of direct bias, which is why it was selected as a way to ensure that all communities receive the same opportunities to educate their children (not that this worked out in practice).

[0] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/expose/book/cloak-meritocrac...

Essays and interviews are a thing of the past. I believe they are only used when students' applications are near the borderline?

It's incredibly hard from a recruitment point of view. A degree in the US, even from a mediocre university, at least means that the student is capable of some amount of hard work and application.

But in India, colleges simply don't fail kids. Some others inflate their grades just for bragging rights ("our students had an average score of 80%).

So every time I see an application from a college that I haven't heard of (which is pretty much every college apart from the top ones), I would be skeptical: can this kid actually work hard or am I just wasting my time?

> that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them

That sounds sad to you because you are looking at it from a Western perspective, when you have couple of hundred people interested for a job you can use a certification to filter lot of the candidates.

And like any metric that is easier to "game" you end up in the situation where a bunch of people go for the easy route of taking certifications because they act as a filter and that same filter doesn't work as intended because people are gaming the system.

It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter, to game this you become a cheater.

Of course that it's also harder to scale but if India has such a huge problem in filtering candidates there must exist some companies doing good skill-based assessments and that should be the way forward.

Or just keep the status quo of needing to take certifications and competing with unqualified people that have the same papers you have, for me it's a race to the bottom.

> It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter

Agree, which is why some Indian companies have started using skills based assessment websites now.

<sarcasm intent="juxtaposition with American groups seen as obsessed with pieces of paper"> Sounds like someone didn't get into Harvard

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