Aayat Fatima
What would you say to a system that applauds only 1% of people and calls the remaining 99% failures?
Totally absurd, right?
Every individual is extraordinary in their own way. We believe this. We preach this. But do we truly live by it?
Our society has created a hierarchy of worth, one where a student’s value is decided by an exam score.
A science student is judged by whether they clear JEE or NEET. The 1% who do are celebrated as “the future,” while the rest 99% are dismissed as background characters in someone else’s story.
But here’s the truth: one exam cannot define your intelligence, your passion, or your potential. Yet somehow, we’ve let it define us.
This obsession with ranks and percentages doesn’t just harm self-worth, it destroys mental peace. Students start equating failure in an exam with failure in life. The pressure to meet impossible expectations suffocates individuality.
Behind every “drop year” and every “backbencher” joke lies someone who feels invisible, someone questioning their worth just because they didn’t make it to that 1%. We forget that success is not supposed to be a race, it’s supposed to be a journey.
JEE and NEET have become ritualistic gates that pretend to measure worth. Two papers, a few hours, and years of toil are distilled into a single rank that decides who gets to dream and who must learn to settle.
It isn’t just an exam, it’s a marketplace that rewards those who can buy the right hours, the right coaching, the right city.
Coaching centres sell hope in instalments; prosperity buys practice tests and mock series, while millions who can’t afford it are left to scrape by on raw talent and raw luck.
Worse, this exam-centric obsession manufactures a cruel hierarchy: if you clear the test, you are talented; if you don’t, you’re disposable.
Talent that blooms outside the coaching ecosystem, creative problem-solvers, resilient doers, students from small towns and government schools, gets erased by an algorithm of elimination. That is not selection; that is selection by privilege.
Beyond fairness, there’s human cost. Years of adolescence are turned into an endurance test: sleep deprivation, anxiety, parental pressure, and the brutal language of ranks.
Students who might have reshaped arts, entrepreneurship, public service, or grassroots innovation are redirected to chase a rank.
Society loses variety and gains a conveyor belt of similar-trained graduates, not necessarily more creative or more conscience-driven professionals.
It’s time we stop mistaking ranks for destiny. The brilliance of a mind cannot be captured by an OMR sheet, nor can a number define a dream. True success lies not in clearing an exam, but in finding clarity, in knowing what makes you come alive.
When we start valuing curiosity as much as calculation, compassion as much as competition, maybe then our education will finally start educating.
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