Time for better evaluation system
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: February 27, 2012 -

Matriculation examination has long been taken as one of the first defining moment of a student’s academic prowess.

The importance of this examination as a stepping stone for further progress in higher educational pursuits and ultimately landing a good career with all the accompanying perks has made the students and their parents strive their utmost to to do well in this exam.

The obsession to succeed in matriculation examination is so great that the students and more so their parents are willing to go to any length to achieve their goal.

This obsession, we have been observing for the last many many years, has distorted the very essence of education and it starts quite early in the life of a students.

Right from elementary stage, everything is geared towards scoring high marks in exam. Increasingly, schools are laying more and more stress on rot learning in the name of education.

The idea being to spoon feed the students with the right answers and make sure that he or she reproduces the same on the day of so reckoning – the exam day.

Learning has become devoid of fun, the whole process has become tedious exercise. There is hardly any attempt to arouse the interest and curiosity of the students in discovering new horizons, new realms of knowledge.

Somewhere, we seem to have forgotten one of the most basic aim and purpose of education, which to make its recipients, a better person, a more rounded individual, someone who lets rationality guide his or her actions, someone who is aware of the world around him, who does not let prejudice and bias guide his judgment, among other things.

The obsession with success in exam means that students are forced to concentrate all their energy, time and labour towards doing well and scoring the highest possible marks.

This leaves them with no time to pursue their area of interests, or venture into new areas of knowledge which may not have any relevance to exams.

And adding to the distortion of education is the numerous private tuition centres run by individual teachers or establishments which specialize in preparing the students for various exams, starting from the matriculation to entrances exams for engineering, medicine, MBA, bank probationary officer, NDA, CDS, civil service, you name it.

From the moment he or she wakes up, the young student is carted to various tuition centres before school hours, after school, it is yet another round of tuition centres, not to forget about the home works before going to sleep.

With such a punishing schedule, with such narrow vision, how can we expect our young people to grow into caring, rounded human beings? At the time of the exam itself, many parents run from pillar to post to arrange a ‘good centre’ – free copying is allowed – for their wards.

Use any means but score good marks, succeed at all costs, is the loud and clear message. What are we teaching our children? What moral values are we inculcating in them?

It is high time we move away from giving so much importance and value to exams in judging a student. Concepts like the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, as provided under the RTE, which judges a student on on a much broader scale including his or her socio-emotional attributes, which also talks about various tools and methods of testing other than just exams should implemented at the earliest in the state.

This could be one of the ways of reversing the obsession with exams, as we know it today, and at the same time correct some of the distortion which has crept in our education system.