The test I wish I had taken

I still dream about examinations.

In those dreams, I am running late. I cannot find my examination hall. Sometimes my pen suddenly runs out of ink halfway through writing. I wake up with a racing heart before remembering that I left university years ago.

I have never been a fan of examinations. I doubt anybody truly is. For most of us, exams meant memorising pages after pages of information, reproducing them on paper and forgetting them as soon as the results came out. We were rarely encouraged to think; we were trained to remember.

That is perhaps why the recently viral admission test question paper of Jadavpur University’s Bengali Department startled me. Not because the questions looked difficult.

Because they looked... different.

Instead of asking students to reproduce facts, the paper asked them to think, imagine and connect. Ever since I saw it, I have found myself answering those questions in my head.

The very first one asks: “The most powerful female character you have encountered in literature or cinema.”

At my age, I can probably think of several names. But at that age of 17/18, I could only think of Dipabali from Saatkahon. Rajlakshmi from Srikanta. Perhaps Aloka from Dena Paona. At my current age, I could write about why one represents resilience, another defiance, and another the quiet strength that often goes unnoticed. I could even argue that there is no single correct answer.

But then another thought struck me. This question is not for me.

It is meant for a seventeen or eighteen-year-old sitting for an admission test.

What would my eighteen-year-old self have written?

Would I have been able to analyse a literary character beyond narrating the story? Would I have had enough confidence to defend my choice? Would I even have read enough literature by then?

If the honest answer is no, then perhaps the more important question is why.

Another prompt asks students to compare Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee. Today I could probably write about Soumitra’s understated portrayal of Apu, or Uttam Kumar’s magnetic screen presence in Nayak or Saptapadi. But could I have done that when I was eighteen?

Again, I don’t think the problem would have been my age.

The problem would have been my education.

Our schools rarely asked us to watch films thoughtfully, discuss literature critically or develop opinions of our own. We learnt summaries instead of stories, notes instead of novels, and answers instead of arguments.

Then there are perhaps the most imaginative prompts in the paper. Imagine a literary adda featuring Baikuntha Mollik, Lalmohan Ganguly and Satyajit Ray.

Out of curiosity, I asked a first-year university student about these questions.

“I don’t know who Baikuntha Mollik or Lalmohan Ganguly are,” she admitted.

She had never watched an Uttam Kumar film. Outside the prescribed textbooks, the only books she had read were Humayun Ahmed’s Himu series.

I do not blame her.

In fact, I wonder how many students of her generation, or even mine, would have answered those questions comfortably.

I paused longest at the question asking students to imagine a conversation among the birds whose forest was being cut down.

Imagine that. Not an essay on deforestation. Not a definition of climate change. Just imagine what the birds would say to one another as they watched their home disappear. The question was asking whether students could imagine loss through someone else's eyes, or perhaps, through someone else's wings.

And then I reached the final question on the paper.

“If you had the opportunity to ask God three questions...”

I smiled.

Not because I immediately knew what I would ask, but because I realised there was no right answer.

Would I ask why suffering exists? Why good people die too soon? Whether justice eventually prevails? Or perhaps I would waste one question asking whether I have chosen the right profession. Every answer would reveal something about the person writing it. The question was never really about God.

It was about us.

Then I imagined the same question appearing in one of our university admission tests. Not because it is difficult, but because of everything that would follow.

Before a single student picked up a pen, social media would probably erupt. There would be debates about whether the question was appropriate, whether it was offensive, whether it crossed some invisible line. Television talk shows would dissect it. Facebook would do what Facebook does best. The conversation would no longer be about imagination or philosophy. It would become another culture war.

Which makes me wonder: are we mature enough to answer such a question?

Or even mature enough to ask it?

More importantly, are we mature enough to separate curiosity from irreverence?

Ever since the question paper went viral, many Bangladeshis have been asking the same thing: Why don’t our universities ask questions like these?

Perhaps they should.

But before demanding better question papers, we should ask ourselves a more uncomfortable question.

Have we prepared our students to answer them?

I know this may sound harsh, but I believe the answer is largely no.

People often blame technology for declining reading habits. Certainly, endless scrolling has changed the way we consume information. But technology alone is not responsible.

Our students hardly have the time to become readers.

School is followed by coaching classes. Coaching is followed by private tuition. Weekends disappear into model tests and admission preparation. Success is measured almost entirely by grades. Reading novels, watching classic films, joining debate clubs, participating in theatre, learning music, or simply sitting quietly with a book have quietly become luxuries rather than parts of education.

We have built an education system that rewards speed over curiosity, memorisation over reflection and certainty over imagination.

Then, one day, we expect students to write about Rajlakshmi, Uttam Kumar, Baikuntha Mollik, birds mourning the loss of their forests, or even ask God three questions.

How could they?

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Jadavpur question paper is not that it is creative. It is that it assumes students have lived a cultural life outside the classroom—that they have read books, watched films, argued with friends, fallen in love with fictional characters, questioned the world around them and developed opinions of their own.

That assumption itself feels revolutionary.

Changing an admission test is easy.

Creating generations of curious readers, thoughtful viewers and independent thinkers is much harder.

When I first saw the question paper, my instinct was to answer every question in my head. Some I answered with certainty. Some made me uncomfortable. Some sent me searching through memories of books I had read years ago. And a few made me question myself.

For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing I were sitting for that examination. Because it wasn’t asking me to remember. It was asking me to think.

Perhaps that is what education should have been doing all along.