Last week, my son was stopped at the gates of his Class 12 board examination centre. Not because he was late, or because he lacked an admit card, but because he wasn’t wearing his school tie. After a frantic few minutes of pleading he was admitted. He took the paper. He will likely to remember the micro-trauma of that episode longer than the questions he answered.

On its face this is a trivial thing — a strip of cloth, a momentary blunder. However, it is a perfect little case study in misapplied incentives and misplaced attention. It shows how an education system that should be allocating scarce cognitive and administrative resources toward learning instead focuses them on visible, enforceable trappings that add no measurable value to what matters: students’ acquired knowledge and capabilities.

The school’s dress code is a classic case of what economists call signalling, or in other words, how observable attributes stand in for unobservable ones. For instance, in a labour market, a degree signals competence; a tie signals conformity. Similarly, a school uniform signals a student’s affiliation and, ideally, instils a sense of discipline and collective identity. For the school, it’s a low-cost way to enforce and project an image of order.  

However, the examination centre is not the school. The exam hall is the great leveller, the purest arena of a student’s intrinsic value. Here, the only thing that should be evaluated is the human capital accumulated over years of study: the ability to solve for ‘x’, to structure an essay, to discuss the issues Vikshit Bharat is facing. 

The examination is meant to be a screening mechanism that measures a student’s actual knowledge. In this context, a tie becomes a superfluous variable, what an economist would call a deadweight loss—a cost (of anxiety, of potential exclusion) that yields no benefit to anyone. It adds friction to the system without adding value to the output. So why does this rule persist, especially at an external examination centre? This is where the “colonial hangover” intersects with economics. It’s a form of path dependency. We continue to follow a rule simply because it has always been followed, a relic of a British administrative state that prized form over substance. 

The British colonial administrative apparatus prized order and visible markers of authority. But more than that, it’s a symptom of a system obsessed with visible, easily enforceable proxies for quality. When we cannot guarantee the quality of teaching or the robustness of learning (the substance), we over-index on what we can control: the uniform, the hairstyle, the presence of a tie (the form). The time the exam centre staff spent arguing about a piece of cloth is time they did not spend ensuring a anxiety-free environment for the students, a profound misallocation of scarce resources.

It has distributional consequences too. My son’s plea worked because we had the social capital — experience, confidence, perhaps even connections — to push. For a child from a more marginal background without that cushion, the same rule could operate as a gatekeeping device. For them, this rule isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a barrier. The heartbreaking news of a girl ending her life over a slight delay at an exam center serves as a grim reflection of this reality. This is the opposite of what education in a poor state like Bihar should be doing. Education’s greatest instrumental value is its power to be the greatest engine of equality. Yet, by enforcing such irrelevant rules, we make it an engine of exclusion.

This is not an argument to abolish uniforms. Uniforms can serve useful purposes: they reduce visible inequality in some settings, help with group identity, and can simplify logistics. But policy must be discerning. Rules that meaningfully improve learning or equity should be defended; rules that only produce theatrical compliance should be discarded. Exam centres, in particular, should be treated as sanctuaries of assessment integrity and psychological calm. The checklist at the gate should be about admissibility, fairness and security — not the precise knot of a tie.

What, then, should reformers do? 

First, re-anchor rules to outcomes. Evaluate policies by asking: does this reduce learning gaps or increase the reliability of assessment? If not, it’s probably administrative clutter. Second, decentralise judgment where appropriate: empower invigilators and centre managers with clear, simple protocols that prioritise inclusion and minimize discretionary exclusions. Third, measure the cost of compliance burdens: even small frictions have cumulative social costs when multiplied across the millions who sit public examinations each year.

If we want education to be an engine of equality — especially in poorer states, where that engine must be strongest — we need to stop mistaking neckwear for nurture. The real signal of a healthy education system is not a hall full of identical ties but a society where children learn to think, solve problems and move into livelihoods that reflect their talents, not their ability to jump through arbitrary gatekeeping.

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