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Followers of marks
30
May'11
Followers of marks
Every year the number of students who score exorbitant marks in the national board exams keeps increasing. But instead of our students getting smarter, our papers are getting easier and the marking more lenient. How does this dumbing down of the evaluation system impact creativity and analytical thinking?
It shocked me, you know. It ran counter to everything they’d tried to drum into us for 12 years, about how we should aim for the stars, and all of that.” Joydip Bhattacharya, 27, now a copywriter, speaks with emotion. “To have your teacher call you a month before the boards and ask you to tone down the quality of your language while writing essays and stick to the school-prescribed interpretation for the English literature answers was simply ridiculous. I mean, what kind of message are you sending to the kids?”
Why would a teacher ask a student to intentionally lower the quality of his English? “Well, according to her, the ISC board has a rigid idea of what is expected of a class 12 student, and exceeding these expectations, orpresenting a different or creative opinion might be penalised.” If this is the case, what does it say about the quality of education provided by our schools under the current board examination system?
At first glance, things seem pretty okay. Every year, the number of students who pass or score exceptionally high marks in their board exams keeps increasing. For instance, in this year’s CBSE exams, 5,552 students scored more than 90%, a staggering rise of 9.05% (figures are for the Chennai region which covers Maharashtra). This is not an exception but the rule. The ICSE board boasted a pass percentage of 99.97% in Karnataka with only two students out of 7,574 failing to get the passing mark. The board racked up an equally impressive 98.61% pass rate nationally. Surely we, as a nation, must be doing something right for our students to be performing so well.
Dumbing it down
Arundhati Chavan, head of the department of education at SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, has a different perspective on the matter. “How are these marks possible? Students are scoring 97-98% in language papers. Instead of a marking system based on how much of the textbook the student can accurately reproduce in their examination papers, they should be marked according to the depth of conceptual understanding. Not only this, the questions should be tougher as well, so that students who have a solid understanding of the subject will be rewarded for their merit. Nowadays everyone gets over 90. How can the truly exceptional students distinguish themselves from those who just memorise what there is in the text-book?”
Such dumbing down can lead to frustration among students. “The boards test the basic level of students. There is no allowance made for gifted children,” says Anand Benegal, a class 9 student in Mumbai. He speaks of how teachers are loathe to explore anything outside the curriculum. “You feel limited. You cannot creatively express yourself the way you want to.”
This can have adverse consequences when students go on to university. Vatsala Singhal, who studied mathematics at St Stephens College, found a wide gulf between the mathematics syllabus in school and the one in college. “In school you would take a few concepts and go with them, solving a certain type of problem. It doesn’t give you an idea of what you are likely to encounter later in higher education,” she says.
How much did you score?
Sudeshna Chatterjee, principal of Jamnabai Narsee School in Mumbai, says candidly, “At the end of the day, it’s the marks that count, because that’s what will get you into a decent college.”
Ultimately, it all boils down to getting into ‘good colleges’. But what is that doing to our education? Professor CNR Rao, former director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), says, “We’re more obsessed with marks than with what a student learns. We’re more worried about the size of our salary than the quality of work; we obsess about cricket statistics more than the eventual results. Our society is getting oriented in the wrong manner. Numbers are becoming a measure of our success and esteem.”According to Chavan, the main reason our marking scale has gotten easier is the emphasis parents put on high marks. This then trickles up to the schools, whose reputation revolves around the marks its students get, and finally at the board level, it affects policy regarding the setting of question papers and marking of answer scripts.
Instead, according to educationists like Chavan and Rao, the development of critical thinking and analytical skills should be the primary focus of schools. And there is much we can learn from the techniques employed by foreign boards like the IB. Yash Gauhar, 22, went through the IB system. “It’s vastly different. For example, in environmental sciences, to study the difference in bio-diversity between different environments, we went to Matheran to collect samples and tested them against samples collected from Mumbai. It wasn’t just based on what was written in the textbook,” he says.
Compare this to the experience of Poornima Ramesh, a 15-year-old student of Arya Vidya Mandir, who has just completed her ICSE exams. “We were not allowed to express our own interpretations of the poems and stories we studied,” she complains. “When we were studying Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci, I felt the poem was a bit silly. The knight was corny in the way he expressed his love, but our teacher thought it was a great tragic love poem and that was the interpretation we had to go with,” she adds. When asked whether she had any idea of English Romantic poetry — a context that would have further illuminated her reading of the poem — she answers in the negative. “We were told exactly how to interpret it and that was that.”
On the other hand, Gauhar’s class, for their literature paper, had to discuss the role of women in Macbeth. “We had continuous assessment throughout the year which helped us explore these themes.”
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