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Mark, it's a bug in the system

Flawed notions of merit are pushing young people to the brink, reports BAGESHREE S.

BOGGED DOWN Our system of exams and evaluation does not give young people a fair chance PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.

Bugs of many kinds seem to have made cosy homes in our education system. A couple of them messed up the computers in the P.U. Board, forcing it to postpone the announcement of the results this year three times over. A record in a city that boasts global-standard tech companies and software professionals.

We might just survive these relatively benign variety of bugs, considering our reputation for being an adjust maadi culture. But there are more malignant ones that are spreading a dangerous cancer — those which build pressure on young students, create mental agony, make them feel useless, and in some cases, push them to death year after academic year.

Nine suicides

This year, there have been nine reported cases of students appearing for P.U.C. and C.B.S.E. XII Standard exams killing themselves because they either didn't "score well" or failed. Among those who took their marks sheets as markers for whether or not they deserved to live were the children of a software company professional, a clerk in a college, and a wageworker. The nature of pressure is surely different for students coming from different social classes. But they are all victims of a system that chokes them to death with the firm belief that the difference between merit and the lack of it lies in the decimal difference between .1 and .01 per cent of marks.

This mode of evaluating a youngster's worth and judging him/her worries Kamala V. Mukunda who teaches at Centre for Learning, an alternative school. "Any measurement process has some error built into it. This is true even when you measure blood pressure, or weight or height. For exams like the P.U., there is no way of even knowing what this error is. We must not make the mistake of assuming that the marks obtained by a student represent some `true' score. Yet this assumption is made by colleges, parents, and so also the poor students." And these exams that test not what one has learnt but what one can recall within a certain time frame determines which way a youngster's career and life swings.

In a two-part article on the reservation debate in The Hindu earlier this month, Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav elaborated on our warped notion of merit: "In a situation marked by absurd levels of `hyper-selectivity'... merit gets reduced to rank in an examination. As educationists know only too well, the examination is a blunt instrument. It is good only for making broad distinctions in levels of ability; it cannot tell us whether a person scoring 85 per cent would definitely make a better engineer or doctor than somebody scoring 80 per cent or 75 per cent or even 70 per cent. In short, it is only a combination of social compulsion and pure myth that sustains the crazy world of cut-off points and second decimal place differences that dominate the admission season. Such fetishised notions of merit have nothing to do with any genuine differences in ability."

This argument could well be applied to our local situation where 88,000 students compete for 5,000 seats in the CET exams and 69,116 eager students come from all over India for the COMED-K tests which offers 35,104 seats in professional courses.

Ratna Appanender, a student of law, has escaped the more exacting (and ruthless) method of evaluation and ranking by opting out of the engineering-medicine rat race. But the entrance test for the law course she took was an adequate indicator of the fallacy of our system of evaluation. "It's more than clear that these tests don't ensure that the most intelligent people get in. But that, sadly, is the assumption everybody makes. This belief is built into our system and determines a lot in our lives even if we personally don't believe in it at all."

Sudha Sitaraman, who teaches sociology at Government Arts and Science College, also points out that our evaluation system that stresses merit to the decimal point of absurdity on the one hand also allows marks and degrees to be bought on the other. "It's not as if we have a fool-proof system even within the conventional framework."

And this arbitrary system of evaluation determines young people's careers and notion of self worth. One student (who does not want to be named) talks about how he went through the exam question papers every day trying to mark himself, pushing himself further and further into depression until results were out. He has scored 83 per cent, which isn't "good enough". Disappointment for this young boy comes coupled with anxiety and guilt, considering how much money his parents spent on his tuition. "Not that my parents are building pressure, but I feel it nevertheless," he says, pointing to how it is a systemic malaise.

Another level of pressure

If this is the kind of pressure for one section of students, Sudha talks about how pressure works at another level for students like her own, who come from a lower socio-economic strata and don't even have any "social capital" to fall back on. "Most of students come from rural areas. If our system were to take into account their experiential learning as an indicator of intelligence, they would do fabulously well. But that never happens." Education is their only hope of upward mobility. But the system, unfortunately, is too flawed to give them a fair chance.

In the 1980s, Howard Gardner, professor of Education at Harvard University, questioned the view that intelligence is a singular property. He said that the measure of intelligence cannot be based on the results of specific tests, but on the individual's ability to solve problems. In his book Frames of Mind, Dr. Gardner defined intelligence as "a psychobiological potential to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in at least one cultural context." Intelligence isn't a fixed quantity, but a process, he argued.

But our notion of intelligence evaluation is completely off this mark. Sudha points out that in a consumerist society, "worth" and "success" are increasingly measured by how much you earn and spend. "It's a time when a young person is led to believe that he is not worth much if he is not a manager in a company by 30." And this — if you are not a minister's son or inherit the company itself from your father — is decided by the marks sheet.

But isn't it tragic when a young life's worth is thus reduced, asks Kamala. "Even if the exams were measuring `intelligence' (which is highly questionable), is that the only measure of a human being's worth?... To reduce 18-year-olds narrowly to their academic ability is stupid, but we insist on doing it."

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