Bring back exams if you want to bring back brilliance

Let us say that you are fond of potato wafers and you want nothing but the best. So obviously you will pick the best potatoes but the farmer says no sir we do not have a policy of detaining the rotten or bad potatoes. So you somehow take these potatoes to the peeling department where upon peeling and slicing you note that some are rotten from the inside but yet again you are not allowed to pick out the rotten ones. The logic given is who knows maybe they will blossom to become fresh and tasty again. Finally when the potatoes are fried you are then allowed to take out the unfit ones.

Now tell me is it really worth waiting for so long and letting unfit potatoes nestle with the fit ones, spending so much time monitoring the unfit ones or even spending so much money taking them through all those steps? Doesn’t it make sense to weed out the unusable ones at every stage?

Last week, the Union HRD Ministry did just that when it amended the Right to Education (RTE) Act, now providing students 2 chances in case of poor performance before detaining him.

This amendment will put an end to the disastrous policy of automatic promotions mooted by the Act in the existing format. The RTE Act in the existing avatar was introduced by former education minister Kapil Sibal. The Act spelled out that that all students should be compulsorily and automatically promoted till class VII; thus, the only stage when they could be detained or in other words filtered out would be at the class IX exams.

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But isn’t it a fair scenario where we let students float all the way to class IX before detaining them? The answer is a resounding NO. Let’s take a quick look at the system. Typically less than 5% of students were detained in every class. However, if this system is straightaway effective from class IX it would need to filter out almost 30% of the students at one shot which is impossible.

To escape this impossible situation, schools decided to not filter out students even in class IX thus shifting the burden on the SSC/CBSE/ICSE Board. Here again the same story was repeated as the Board was unwilling to risk public outcry of detaining close to 40% of students.

Ultimately, the college has been provided with inferior stock of raw students. In a fair scenario, colleges wouldn’t have admitted these students but due to lack of filters they are forced to give them admissions. One fears to even imagine the kind of work force churned out by the system if this process was to continue. Can you imagine visiting a doctor who is a product of this system? For one I wouldn’t want to visit him.

Then there is this grace marks system to wrestle with. After the first round of correction the sheets are handed over to a local moderator, who decides to provide the appropriate grace marks ensuring not many students fail in a given region. It doesn’t end here, the answer sheets are then sent to the district moderator, who applies the appropriate multiplier ensuring that the passing percentage in his territory is “acceptable”.

You can very well imagine these filters which were in place even before Sibal’s proposal, these made the situation even worse.

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Lets turn our gaze to the backbone of the education system – our teachers. Absence of class tests, and and the use of persuasion to make children learn actually weakened the system. Most teachers ended up begging students to complete their project assignments, a scenario virtually unheard of. This was necessitated by the onus on the teacher to fill up the required forms and inform the education inspector that the students have complied with the qualifying norms.

Further, The RTE in its present forms required the teacher to put in the additional hours that may be needed to ensure that all students qualify. Since no detention is allowed, the teacher were forced to either fudge records and promote an inept child or work additional hours, or finally plead with the students. The situation had become deplorable.

This educational policy articulated by the HRD ministry could be one of the most fruitful ones. The HRD ministry’s decision takes into account that if schooling is bad, it will mean bad outputs which in turn would mean sub-standard inputs for colleges. And no college can be expected to graduate excellent students if the input itself is bad. If one has to improve India’s college education, it must begin at the level of schools. And if schools need to improve, the need for annual tests and examinations needs to be restored urgently.

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