You are being too harsh and dismissive. These high stake tests often are a good indicator of certain characteristics and aptitude in a student. These students work hard, study hard with a consistent methodology to understand the subject of the test. They know they are competing with others and the rewards are high. All this requires a disciplined personality and aptitude (there are different kinds of intelligence). And most of those who succeed in this actually do well in life.

Ofcourse, it doesn't mean that your criticisms against the current model isn't justified or without merit on some aspects, providing you judge it from the right perspective. For example, India is a developing country and our education system isn't looking to identify and groom the next genius. We don't have the resources for that. So it is currently aimed to create an educated working professional class from all sections of our society that can uplift the economy of the country by generating wealth and decrease the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor (to create an egalitarian society). And what do any industry look for - a hard working, consistent performer, who has the capability to understand how a system / process works and can adapt to it well.

That is why indians, and asians in general, are known and respected for their work ethics around the world in most industries.

But yes, people like you and me would struggle in this system, because the system isn't designed to accommodate the needs of those who aren't "normal" / psychologically healthy. (Hopefully that will change with economical growth and development in education). Note though that this doesn't mean that students who fail to adapt to this system all necessarily end up as failures in life. This is where the social culture also comes into picture in many asian societies. The family and social network of person in the society all try to help them too, both in trying to get access to best education they can afford and in trying to professionally help someone. (A good example of this is how parents make sacrifices and pay for their kids education. And thanks to that, the majority of us with a degree enter the professional world debt-free. (If you are in the US, can you afford to pay for your daughter's education and will you?) It's not all black and white as you think ...

Reality is when I grew up standardized testing made or broke a person, and I couldn’t go to school. I was lucky in that I had always programmed and landed a great job at Netscape. But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing. Had I been 5 years older my life would be much different. I later went back to college and graduated highest honors from UIUC CS, but found a side door into the program owing to my standardized testing failures blocking the normal route through. Given my performance above all other students in my class, my standardized test scores had no correlation to my ultimate academic performance.

Now there’s more focus on the total person and that’s both expensive, but I believe leads to overall better academic outcomes by selecting people individually for their ability to excel in the academic environment of the specific school.

But give the sheer scale of the population applying in India assessing each individual is obviously on the surface impractical. This isn’t an inditement of India or it’s people or it’s system. But it’s also a tragedy. The world is sadly full of those.

I would however hold my statement is still true if harsh. While high test scores may indicate an ability to work hard and ambition, low test scores don’t indicate the opposite. I would argue it’s more closely correlated to the ability to acquire funding for tutoring and a family without the need of your time to help the family. To your point my wife is from Southeast Asia and her family was extremely poor, but they had her siblings drop out of school and work to pay for her books and clothes and afford her time to study for the tests, which she passed top of her country. But her siblings paid for it with their future. I’m proud of her, but not of the system. Her siblings aren’t failures per se, they just never got an opportunity.

But if you have applicants >> slots and an inability to scale a more accurate measure, a capricious but difficult criteria works. But I wouldn’t be particularly proud of that.

Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path. My wife’s siblings even if they went back to school and were accepted wouldn’t be able to find jobs because they followed a non traditional path. This is sad, and I wonder how much faster their country would advance if they had a less rigid job path for their people. How many people are disenfranchised because they matured slower, experienced hardships or illness, or weren’t able to afford the costs of education yet? I’ll betcha is a very large number.

I forgot to add there's another aspect - fighting corruption. Since there are so few quality educational institutes, and the competition so high, introducing any other additional form of assessment (like based on essays or interviews) would invite criticism of corruption and prejudice (linguistic, religion and caste mostly in India). (And it is a fair criticism - in the US some colleges actually moved away from admission based on standardised testing because they wanted to limit number of Jews in their institute. In ancient India, quality education was limited to the upper caste only.). Common entrance exams are thus perceived as more fair to everyone.

> But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing.

This was something I really admired about American businesses in the past, but feel it has changed a lot - they didn't mind hiring workers having proficient skills who are passionate about their work, even if they didn't have a degree. This has really changed now and I blame Asian American immigrants for this, especially indians who tend to look down on someone who don't have a degree or even tend to scrutinise which college they have a degree from before deciding whether to respect their professional skills (Indian Hindu Brahmins, most of whom now run the BigTech's, in particular tend to be worse about this attitude because they have to compete even harder due to affirmative action policies and thus tend to have a tunnel vision when it comes to judging people through their degrees).

(I do know that the IT industry has always leaned towards hiring qualified professionals because it is a relatively young field).

This also reminds me of someone's struggle in India - he had failed to clear a few subjects in his engineering (from an average indian college) and thus didn't get his degree in the usual 4 years. He cleared those subjects and finally got his degree after 2-3 years. But he had been working in the IT industry, without a degree, right after college. Here's the kicker - Indian companies refused to recognize his work experience (based on which pay negotiations are done) during the period he worked without a degree. So they would subtract the 2-3 years he had worked without a degree, and offer him less pay. This was even after he had worked hard to get additional certifications in the industry to make up for the lack of passing away from a "good" college. He found true professional respect based on his experience only in the USA.

> Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path.

That's is true, but money and social connections also play a great role here. Middle class and rich people have more options for second chances, than the poor. And what you described about your wife's family situation is indeed quite common - some of my classmates had brothers and sisters who couldn't afford a decent college education because they were poor, and instead chose to sacrifice and pay for their siblings education. But again, note that our social culture (unlike the west) lays a lot of emphasis on helping family member, and often, these educated siblings did contribute back financially (if they were decent individuals who didn't succumb to selfishness). One of my friend and classmate ensured that he paid for brother's kids education for the sacrifices his brother made for him.