How much can an average student score in the toefl?

Why are admissions to Indian colleges based on just a quantitative score that just accounts for how intelligent the student is but not his/her aptitude/interest/expertise in the field of study the student wishes to pursue?

• In colleges outside India, students are expected to write essays which actually test their interests in the subject they want to pursue. They also check for all-round qualities in the students, like their extra-curricular activities .etc. They check for consistency and aptitude through many standardized tests like SAT/ACT/TOEFL apart from school grades. The whole admission process is an experience! Whereas, in India, your admission is based on a very very competitive exam score which tests just your Physics, Chemistry and Math skills. Think about it, a student passionate about cars/flights(and has promising future in the field), wants to study Mechanical Engineering, but his grades did not meet admission requirements in India and he gets some branch he doesnt like at all. What can he/she do?

• Answer:

  A few comments: India is India, by which I mean: it will not work for us to compare India with any other country. India has a humongous population and a very small number of good undergraduate institutions; this gives rise to a very high selectivity. I think that the undergraduate admissions policy for most institutes hasn't been very successful here in the US at least. I am a TA for a first-year undergraduate course at a major private university (to which admissions are supposed to be competitive), and I find that the quality of the students, especially their mathematical training, is very poor indeed. I don't know how much the admissions process is to blame - perhaps their high school system is unbelievably poor - but I have the hunch that, as a result of the admissions policy, deserving students among the entrants are divided into several OK-ish universities instead of being concentrated in a few excellent universities. I am of the opinion that this is undesirable. In my honest opinion, the competitive exam system is actually quite well-suited to Indian needs, and in fact other countries should learn from it. How do you quantify interest? I am sure that if you tell students to write up essays about their interest, they will be trained by their coaching centers to write good essays displaying interest in whichever branch is in vogue at that moment. You will also find, for example, students learning to code in high school for reasons other than interest. Rather than have such a subjective assessment, it is better to look at the objective score which displays the student's aptitude in physics, chem and math. Last year, about 1.4 million students appeared for JEE-Main, of which about 150,000 qualified for JEE-Advanced. Remember that ALL these (at least the ones who qualified for Advanced) are reasonably bright students. Can you think what a nightmare it would be to read 150,000 passionate essays displaying love for computer science? How do you distinguish the sincere ones from the not-so-sincere ones? The Indian system works quite well in India, and in fact would work well in other countries as well.