Is Higher Education Getting Too Good at Gaming Recruitment?
- Dr Sp Mishra
- Aug 9
- 4 min read
I recently came across a video interview with the Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Academics of VIT (Vellore Institute of Technology), discussing the university's new Adaptive Curriculum of Excellence (ACE). The conversation offered an interesting glimpse into how VIT is attempting to rethink the traditional engineering degree, and several of the ideas struck me as genuinely progressive. One particular provision, however, made me pause: the Makeup Exam mechanism. It also got me thinking about a larger question, are universities increasingly designing academic systems not just to educate students, but also to help them navigate and, perhaps, optimise for the filters used by recruiters?
VIT's ACE is a genuine attempt to rethink the engineering degree. It moves beyond a largely fixed programme structure with Concentrations, Ancillaries, Honours and Minors. Students can pursue a Second Major, earn credits through NPTEL and other AICTE-approved online courses, and substitute courses within prescribed baskets. More significantly, VIT appears to be opening its advanced labs, Makerspaces and faculty expertise across departments, so a student's curiosity no longer has to stop at their branch's door.
One provision, though, is worth pausing on: the Makeup Exam, which gives students a route to clear backlogs and potentially avoid a history of arrears continuing to affect their final academic record.
Recovery, or Erasure?
There is nothing wrong with giving students a second chance at a failed course. People fail for many reasons, a hard subject, a bad semester, or circumstances that have nothing to do with ability. Education should allow recovery.
But recovering from failure and erasing the evidence of it are not the same thing. If the practical effect of the Makeup Exam is a cleaner transcript for recruiters, the question isn't whether VIT intended this. It is whether the mechanism now serves education or recruitment optimisation.
And that points to a deeper problem, one that sits with recruiters as much as with universities.
When Hiring Filters Start Shaping Curricula
Recruiters lean on CGPA, backlog counts and academic gaps because they're easy to screen at scale. Easy to measure is not the same as predictive. A 9.2 CGPA with no failures may signal an excellent hire. So may a student who struggled, recovered, and became an outstanding engineer. The transcript alone can't tell you which one has more resilience or judgement.
This is the uncomfortable part: we tell young people to experiment, take risks, and learn from mistakes, then penalise the visible record of having done so the moment they enter the job market. The lesson that survives is not "failure is part of learning." It's "failure is fine, as long as no one can see it."
Life Isn't a Straight Line
Few lives move in a straight line. People fail courses, change fields, lose jobs, take breaks, face unexpected setbacks, and sometimes outgrow the choice they made at eighteen by the time they're twenty-eight. The qualities recruiters say they want, resilience, adaptability, judgement and the capacity to recover, are often built through exactly this kind of disruption.
Yet hiring systems often prefer candidates whose records show none of it. We want graduates equipped for uncertainty, while filtering for transcripts that show none.
What's Genuinely Good About ACE
None of this should obscure what ACE gets right. The Second Major can add real interdisciplinary depth. Concentrations and Ancillaries allow purposeful specialisation. Credit for NPTEL and other approved online learning acknowledges that meaningful learning happens outside the classroom. Cross-department access to labs and Makerspaces could open up real room for experimentation.
Flexibility is the right instinct. It should expand what students can learn not just how cleanly they can package what they've already done.
Recruiters Have Work to Do Too
Employability can't be a conversation about universities alone. A failed course tells you someone failed a course not whether they'll fail as an engineer. A high CGPA tells you about academic performance not about someone's ability to handle ambiguity, work across disciplines, or recover when something goes wrong.
If what's easiest to measure quietly becomes what we value most, we shouldn't be surprised when curricula start optimising for the measurement.
If employers actually want adaptable and resilient graduates, recruitment needs to assess for those traits directly not infer them from the absence of a bad semester.
The Real Question about Higher Education
The most useful version of a flexible curriculum wouldn't help students construct a perfect transcript. It would help them become genuinely more capable, free to explore, change direction, take hard courses, and occasionally fail and recover, without one setback defining them permanently.
But that raises a fair question: why do students need a mechanism to erase failure in the first place? Professional life will hand out setbacks with no advance notice and no Makeup Exam. Perhaps the most useful thing a university can teach isn't how to avoid failure, but how to respond when it arrives anyway.
VIT's ACE model is worth watching for more than its curriculum design. It puts a sharper question in front of Indian higher education: are we building universities that prepare people for an uncertain life, or ones that produce polished candidates for an increasingly rigid hiring system?
That's a question worth asking of VIT, but even more importantly, of the entire education-to-recruitment pipeline behind it.
About the Author:
Dr SP Mishra is the Founder of India Career Centre, a Hyderabad-based career guidance, study-abroad consulting and educational research organisation. He writes and speaks on career decision-making, higher education, skills, employability and the future of work in India. Also hosts the India Career Centre Podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.
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