India Needs a Better Signal Than the Grade

Every hiring season, the same quiet gamble plays out. A company receives hundreds of applications and needs to find the few people who can solve problems nobody has handed them a formula for. What it actually has in hand is a college name, a CGPA, an entrance rank and a polished résumé. Everyone knows these are stand-ins. We use them because, until now, we had nothing better.

I have watched this from the alumni side for many years, and I have come to a simple view: the proxies we rely on measure how well someone has been through a system, not how well they think.

What the proxies miss

A rank tells you someone prepared intensely for a particular exam. A grade tells you they produced the right final answer, often under time pressure, often on problems that resemble ones they had seen before. Neither tells you what happens when the problem is new, the data is messy and the first approach fails. That is the daily reality of work.

The weakness is now sharper. Generative AI can draft a résumé, polish a cover letter and produce a correct-looking answer to almost any assignment. A grade can no longer tell apart the graduate who can reason through an unfamiliar problem from the one who can only prompt a tool well. Employers sense this, and many have responded by adding more rounds of tests and interviews, which adds cost without adding clarity. Mis-hires are expensive for the company and worse for the young person who is placed in a role that does not fit.

A different kind of evidence

Practice-based diagnostic learning offers a way out. In this approach, which I have come to know through my advisory role with YouLEAD Academy, a California start-up founded by Shekhar Chandra and Mansi Chaudhary, a student learns by working through problems, and the system records more than right and wrong. It records which mistake was made, what misconception lay beneath it, whether the student corrected it, and whether the correction was held weeks later on a fresh problem.

Think about what that gives an employer. Instead of a single number, there is a trail of evidence: how a person responds to being wrong, how quickly they repair faulty reasoning, whether they persist on hard problems and whether their understanding lasts. These are exactly the habits a hiring manager hopes to find and cannot see in a transcript. It is the difference between a photograph of someone’s result and a recording of how they work.

The team is planning pilots at community colleges in the United States, and the same can be done in India. Companies, industry bodies and alumni networks are well placed to run small pilots alongside Indian colleges and judge for themselves whether practice records give a clearer view of problem-solving than grades do. If they do, hiring gets fairer as well as sharper, because a first-generation student from a modest college can show what s/he can do without needing a famous name on the resumé.

Also Read: MCA Online Course vs Regular MCA: Key Differences in Learning Format (2026)

Choosing a career for the right reasons

There is a second benefit that matters just as much to me, and it concerns the students themselves.

Young people in India choose careers under heavy pressure from advertised success: the topper’s photograph on a coaching hoarding, the glamour of a particular company or country, the social media version of a good life. Many pick a path because it looks impressive from outside, and discover years later that the daily work does not suit them.

A practice record can offer a more honest guide. When students work through problems across subjects, patterns emerge that no brochure can show. Which kinds of problems do they return to voluntarily? Where do they recover from mistakes quickly and where do they give up? Where does hard work feel like absorption rather than a burden? Enjoyment and persistence are real signals of aptitude. A student who loses track of time untangling a logic puzzle, or who keeps working on design-style problems long after the assignment ends, is telling us something about where his/her strengths lie, if only someone is listening.

Imagine a student guided toward a career because his/her own practice history shows where s/he thrives, rather than because a relative or an advertisement said so. S/he is more likely to stay curious, perform well and remain in that field. Multiply that across a generation and the gain to the country, in talent matched to work it is suited for, is considerable.

What we should do

Three things would help. 1, Industry should say plainly that it wants evidence of problem-solving and be willing to look at new kinds of records alongside grades. 2. Colleges and alumni associations should help run pilots that test whether practice logs predict on-the-job performance. 3. Ed-tech providers, including those I advise, should be held to a clear standard: students must come away able to think better on their own, not more dependent on a tool.

India has always been good at producing talent. The next step is to see that talent clearly, and to help each young person find the work that suits him/her best.

_________________________________________________________________________

Views expressed by C.K. Jain, an IIT Delhi & UC Berkeley alumnus, a past Secretary of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association, and an advisor to YouLEAD Academy, powered by SolveitNOW, which develops the practice-based learning platform referred to in this article.