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Comment by hagy | Hacker News Reader

I think this could be solved by including randomization. E.g., if the top schools currently take the top 5% of students by test score, then they could instead consider the top 25% of students and select 20% of them through a lottery. In that case there is still value to performing well on the test, but you can't singularly focus on success through testing well.

Students and their parents would need to plan out a career path assuming they don't get into the best schools. They could still spend time and money on education and personal development, but it wouldn't be singularly directed at test prep. Instead, there'd be more focus on developing the foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and diligent habits that promote career success.

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The societal benefits of maintaining fairness in opportunities to move up the economic ladder (speaking about India here) far outweighs other criteria. While one could argue that access to coaching institutes creates an unfair barrier on its own, in practice coaching institutes often teach good students of lesser means for free (because they can advertise their results and good results attract more students to coaching institutes).

These top colleges (in India) are literally a pathway to economic betterment of extended families as they're very affordable (lower income families essentially pay no fees), reasonably good and pretty much guarantee an upper middle class exit. I think introducing any shade of unfairness into this process even if it reflects underlying unfairness of life will damage soceital cohesion.

Source: studied in these colleges and know personally several classmates of very modest means whose extended families benefited from their success. Also personally know a few people in China who have equivalent stories.

The focus of those seeking to help kids is on completely the wrong things. The solution doesn't really lie in optimising the coaching exam system - sure it can be improved but the leverage of outcome is very low - but rather in the larger economy. We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system. This would do more to ease the pressure on kids and families than any regulation on the coaching industry would.

> We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system.

We need these things for good reasons, but the skill premium is here to stay. Both in the West and even more so (because differences are so vast, and redistributing incomes is not exactly feasible) in developing countries like China and India.

Came to suggest this. Has a variety of applications.

And as you point out, if it's all or nothing, or massively increasing returns then the people near the cutoff/bend in the curve fight like hell to stay on the right side of the line instead of rebalancing the incentives.

Basically turns education into a lottery where everyone spends lots of money to buy a lot of tickets because there's no sensible alternative. So appropriate that one of the solutions is to run an actual lottery that you can't buy more tickets for.

Banning tuition seems like a surprisingly far-sighted move, wonder what else they'll come up with and how it'll work out.

I disagree. Banning tuition is a very stupid move. All they did was to deprive poorer kids from accessing these facilities. The families of kids with resources are going to find a way to subvert the ban anyway.

You can always bribe yourself to a winning lottery ticket

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