Testing, testing ... think you take a lot of exams? Not compared to what students in India endure to get into college.

• Author: Yardley, Jim
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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By the time 17-year-old Sadhvi Konchada enters college in the fall, she will have taken 22 separate college entrance exams.

Sadhvi, a high school senior, has daily tutorials, studies constantly, and considers her schedule ridiculous.

But it is not uncommon. At her middle-class New Delhi apartment complex, testing is an obsession for families of high school students. Parents gossip about scores, anguish over them, and pray over them. Students spend months preparing for tests--and worrying about them.

"We have to keep them under pressure," says Jaya Samaddar, whose daughter is studying for the national exams given in 10th grade. "We have no other choice."

For the last decade, India's economy has been booming and the ranks of its middle class expanding rapidly. India also has one of the world's youngest populations. All this means that the cutthroat competition has only gotten worse for the limited number of slots in the country's higher-education system.

High school seniors must pass national board exams to graduate from high school. Since university admissions are based overwhelmingly on these--roughly the equivalent of S.A.T.'s--and other entrance exams, testing season has become a period of excruciating pressure for students and their families.

The mania over testing underscores a fundamental disconnect in Indian education: Even as elite Indian students have achieved remarkable success studying overseas, the educational system in India is widely considered to be failing both the tens of millions of students at the bottom, who drop out before high school, and the smaller pool at the top, who are competing for entrance into universities that are too few and underfinanced.

Experts warn that the potential advantages of India's youthful population could become disadvantages if the government cannot improve the education system rapidly enough to give more students a chance at college. Of the 186 million students in India, only about 12 percent are enrolled in higher education, one of the lowest ratios in the world. (Sixty-nine percent of U.S. high school graduates go to college.) During the next decade, India expects another 40 million students.

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"If you have 150 million or 160 million children who don't go to college, what is going to happen to them 10 or 15 years from now?" asks Kapil Sibal, the government minister who oversees education.

Higher education presents problems of quantity and quality...