No need to drive students up the wall

CHILL PILL

Parents and teachers need to take a step back and let the students face examinations calmly, writes Radha Prathi

Though there are all kinds of examinations taken up by students round-about the year, the examination season stretching between March and April, in particular, has a certain haloed aura about it.

The promotional examinations of schools and colleges are invariably conducted in this season and a maximum number of students are haunted by examinations around this time of the year. The air is charged with mixed feelings of determination, hope, frustration, helplessness, and uncertainty for students, teachers, and parents alike.

All of them appear to be on tenterhooks and try their best to live up to their pre-determined ambitions and goals. They have their own reasons for finding it mandatory to emerge a winner from this annual feature. Having a positive goal and striving to achieve the same is perfectly all right by any standard of thinking. However, one cannot but feel amused to the extent these people bend backwards to attain that success!

The quotient of accomplishment varies from person to person. For instance, a student who has not been clearing his examinations will be only too grateful to scrape through and get promoted to the next class. An average student would like to better his performance. Students in the top-ten range may aim at topping the list.
There is nothing abnormal about this phenomenon and it spells nothing but a healthy urge to fare well in the examinations.

Every pupil’s wish appears to be typical of a student’s life, and left to themselves, they are absolutely capable of arriving at their goals, without any goading. Yet the parents and teachers are visibly disturbed and are going about wagging their fingers at their wards. Students right from the kindergarten level, all the way up to the undergraduate, sometimes even postgraduate levels, feel the pressure of the approaching examinations.

This is the time for parents, guardians, and teachers alike to realize that they should boost the morale and self-esteem of the student rather than deride the candidate about the impending failure. True, some of them may have been negligent and insolent through the academic year, and may not have heeded to the concerned advice of the elders, but this is certainly not the time to trail-off on the “I-told-you-so!” mode.

Once the examinations are over, the parents and teachers can have a heart-to-heart talk and determine where the ward is falling short. They may then take suitable steps to set straight the basic concept of the subject during the coming vacations.

As far as an academic year is concerned, it is best to go with the flow rather than indulge in hypertensive soul-searching sessions. After all, the students attend classes, take tests and exams at regular intervals, and involve themselves in project works and practical classes. They will certainly be briefed on the pattern of the examination that they are expected to face at the end of the academic year, by their teachers, from time to time.

Academicians will testify that the classical public examination system in our country is very predictable. If one goes through old question papers of the last five or six years, one can easily identify the topics and chapters which rule the paper! Moreover, the students are led through infinite sessions of revision sessions and tests. Such being the case, there is no need to drive the students up the wall.

Positive thinking, encouraging words, and emotional support can do the trick to a large extent, as long as it does not make students over-confident. The annual academic war, which weighs down on young minds, can be avoided if the students plough in their best efforts, and likewise, teachers and parents maturely treat exams as just a mandatory routine of student life. There is no need to create mythical exam monsters!