- Firstly abolish this 'fail' business at class X and XII (guess this logic can be applied elsewhere also). The logic behind 'failing' students in exam is to ensure that students who have not attained a certain level to move on to next level of studies. The intention is genuine and in the interest of the students. However in case of Class X and Class XII there is an implicit system of discriminating between students. A student has scored less marks does not get admission to the college he/she wants or does not get the choice of subjects he/she wants. So if a student has scored less marks which means that he cannot get either the choice of subjects or college or both has the option of taking the exam again to improve his score. Now that being the case, why should the administrative people arbitrarily decide whether a certain score is good enough for him to be eligible to apply to colleges and below a certain score he is not. What scientific logic exists behind that magical number of 35? None to my knowledge. So, lets do away with it. A student gets a certain score in the exam - the exam is the same for every individual and so each student can be compared to other, and now the colleges can decide the criteria for admission. If a student does not get what he wants with his marks, he can appear again. If scoring 20, does not do him any harm, then fine, let him get on with his life. What you are doing in the process is taking a huge stigma associated with 'failing' in exam. The best judge of whether a student has learnt enough is not a arbitrary score in an exam given on a particular day, but whether what he has scored gives him the opportunities he thinks he deserves, if not then clearly the student has 'underperforming' relative to his abilities and will want to take the exam again. But if '20' is at best what a student expects to score and at that score he gets a job or a certain course which hones whatever skills he has then let him get on with it, who are we to say that that student has 'failed' and must score 35. Stop this arbitrariness.
- The second thing we need to do, is to stop this business of absolute marks. This is insane to my mind. Putting out a number that a student has scored 97% marks in aggregate and another student has scored 96.9% is to my mind a false precision that we give. The exams conducted are at best an indicator of how well/otherwise a student is compared to other. Giving such precise numbers creates false sense of superiority/discrimination which the exam is not capable of doing. Saying that someone who scores 550 marks in aggregate is a better student than someone who scores 549 is precisely the kind of precision our examination system is incapable of measuring but that is what we precisely end up doing. Admissions to colleges are gained/lost by a single mark. That difference could simply be attributed to randomness and not to skill or intellect. Certainly one can conclude that the student who has scored 550 has done better than a student who has scored say 450 but not 549 or 540. So the solution is to put grades where students in a certain range of scores are bunched together. This will stop the mad competition for marks that is currently plaguing our education system. How insane are things when a student scoring just a single mark less than other student gets rejected admission to a college - precisely because he scored 1 mark less than a student on one particular day on one particular exam. Its insane. We no longer want our students to learn, but simply to score marks. (And this should apply equally to the entrance tests also)
- Another byproduct of introducing the grading system rather than absolute percentage system is that it will force colleges to give admissions after some thought. Currently colleges have the most easy task when giving admission. They just take the top x number of students (where x is number of seats) by marks scored. Now with the grades business, it would not be that simple. Certainly colleges have the right to choose the best possible students, but now choosing the best possible students would imply a bit more hard work on the part of colleges. They would ideally have to consider someother parameters also while giving admission to discriminate among students (many would argue, including me that they ought to be doing this even under current system of absolute marks). So they might consider his extra curricular activities, maybe conduct a personal interview, social background etc etc. This would (at least in theory should) result in a superior selection relative to the earlier 'pure' marks based selection process. This ideally ought to also result in a much more diversified bunch of students being selected enhancing the overall quality of atmosphere in the college.
That's it for now....
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2 comments:
Very accurate assessment. Hope the government too thinks about it the same way,soon, and help all the students.
hahaha, yes right. Even I had fallen prey to the precision addiction during my X std exams and couldnt get into the college I wanted the most. You said it right that the pressure on the students is unnatural but missed a very crucial point. Why does everyone naturally assume that the assessing system is completely flawed. I agree that we do away with the precise marks and get into GPA style assessment, but one thing that cant be forgiven is the poor teaching quality. The teachers are technically qualified, but as per my observation, neither emotionally nor epistemologically. I had been thru the curriculum (for lack of more interesting activities) of the B.Ed course. It has things like child psychology and philosophy of education in its foundation courses. But like any other course, this evaporates faster than actual motive of teaching. I am aware of people's inclination to teach, but years into the same job makes even the teachers feel the monotony.
I had a word with one of my former school teachers, who had retired a long back jus after I graduated from school. She confessed to the most audacious fallacy in the education system (she was an excellent teacher, I still remember her "french revolution" class :) ). She said that teachers, most of them are lethargic enough to ignore the guidelines that school boards provide to them about how they should teach. It comes along with every revision in the syllabus and the teachers are supposed to adapt to it. But apparently no one does.
I was under the ever so lethargic MSBTE, and had to unlearn my whole studying process when I realised that it was doing me no good in terms of actually applying what I had studied (phew, better late than never).
The grading or assessing, according to me, is the least of our concerns, the stigma of failing fades away but the irreparable damage already done in the classrooms for about those 12 years from Jr KG to X std is a crime.
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