JOIN USIf one looks at the newspaper headlines on SSLC, PUC, CBSE, and ICSE pass percentages and stratospheric marks of the toppers, one may conclude that our education system is alive, well, and thriving. But is this a true reflection of the reality?
Ask any good teacher or prospective employer on how our students are performing. The response will be uniformly negative. Why are we then exposed to this farce every year when the SSLC and PUC public examination results are published? Soon after the publication of SSLC and PUC examination results, both newspapers and school managements are keen to publish the list of rank-holders and highest scores though the government stopped announcing ranks few years back. Just about every educationist knows that our testing methodology is not capable of judging students purely based on marks and that too scored in one examination. The public examination system instituted from the times of Macaulay is criticised by one and all. Still why do we continue to give such importance to marks? Is there any significant difference between a person scoring say 620 versus 610 in terms of academic excellence, or his ability to create and innovate or his ability in terms of contributing to society or his knowledge of the society’s problems and the ability to solve them? What do marks in any examination the way they are conducted today show? At best they show that the student has taken the trouble to study the subjects and has some understanding. At worst they show that they are good at attending coaching classes and learning by heart to answer questions.
No doubt, the marks form an ‘objective’ way of assessing the students though it is not clear what that assessment amounts to. In recent years, even the much-admired Joint Entrance Examination system for selecting students to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) have come under fierce attack from some concerned IIT professors, IIT alumni and even from Industrialists.
S Muthuraman, managing director of Tata Steel and an IIT-M alumnus, had questioned the capabilities of IIT students selected based on such a JEE system. It is high time we stopped giving importance to the test results of one public examination and start debating the need for the replacement of such an inhuman and unproductive system of assessing our students. How many more students have to commit suicide, dejected by these examinations before we change the system?
‘Pratham’ has been assessing the educational standards of children in rural areas since four years and has brought out the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). For example in Karnataka, only 67 per cent (pc) and 41 pc of the SSLC students of top ranked Udupi and Mandya respectively were able to do simple subtraction problems in standards 3 to 5. In the case of the least ranked Bidar, the dismal statistic was only 28 pc. What do these statistics tell about the kind of education we are imparting to our future generation?
State wide SSLC percentage is 70 pc while for PUC it is only 43 pc this year. However for ICSE and CBSE for XII, the pass percentages are above 95 pc. Hardly any attention is paid to analyse these statistics. Emphasis is only on highlighting the performance of students based on scoring high marks.
Why should PUC results be so poor when SSLC pass percentage is 70 pc? How are students taking tougher syllabus of CBSE and ICSE are able to register a better performance than PUC students? Is this because it is mostly the private schools which offer these streams?
No questions asked
It is a well recognised problem in our schools that students hardly ask any questions. Even worse teachers also do not encourage students to ask questions. One of the objectives of well-rounded education is to make students to think, and motivate them to ask questions.
I tried to promote a novel experiment called ‘True Education’ to ignite the critical thinking of students and motivate them to ask questions. I had developed this model consisting of twenty sessions of discussing various topics in a college in a rural-based college of Bantwal. This produced phenomenal results. Students who used to cry in the beginning were able to ask questions as the course progressed. During the valedictory they even addressed their teachers to change their teaching methodology. Why are schools which boast of 100 pc examination results not interested in igniting the critical thinking capacity in their students? Let us not get carried away by the high percentage of passes, but concentrate on the urgent reforms required.