How many Indians haven’t heard that old joke about the oversmart student responding to a question on cows.
For those who need to be reminded: the student didn’t know how to answer, so he wrote on the sheet ‘Gai hamari mata hai; humko kuch nahin aata hai (the cow is our mother; I don’t know a thing!)’. The teacher was even smarter. He returned the sheet with the note, saying ‘Bail hamara baap hai; number dena paap hai (and the bull is our father; it’s a sin to give you marks for this!)’
This is an eternal favourite, passed down from one generation of student to another. We all laugh, and we all know that this is a rare case of a careful teacher with a sense of humour. Most students know that their answer-scripts aren’t even read by the teachers, for the boards or university externals. You could write of cows and bulls and get away with it.
You all know the truth about ‘Merit’.
I am astounded by the fact that some of the most intelligent people in blogosphere can continue to argue on the basis of ‘merit’ when they probably know how completely non-relevant it is, given that our means and methods of judging merit are… stupid. That is the only word that comes to mind.
Our exams often generate and encourage stupidity and push forward the least talented of the lot. I am not an IIT student, and will not pretend to know much about the CAT since I didn’t crack it, but it is rather interesting that almost none of our wonderful IIT-ians (for whom such pitted battled are being fought) have made any earth-shattering discoveries or inventions.
[For reference, look at this. This was one of my favourite Outlook issues (register or get your hands on a copy from some library and read it, cover to cover). It outlined several small and big scientific achievements from across the country. How much originality of thought, practical application of theories etc etc, came from the top science/technology institutes? Less than ten percent, I can bet on that!]
What, then, is your idea of ‘merit’?
I’d like to focus on the humanities, because it is more personal.
I was used to being a high scorer in English Literature, all through my schooling. Before my secondary board exams, I had already finished reading the syllabus meant for the senior secondary students.
This was a time when I was seeking to reinterpret poetry, lookng for challenge and allowing my mind to open up to new explanations. I was told that re-interpretation is all very well, but if one didn’t read the ‘guide books’ and didn’t toe the accepted literary line – the line extended by teachers who set the CBSE question-papers, corrected the answer-sheets, and often, used the guide books themselves – one would flunk the boards.
In college, it was the same story. The literature teachers were genuinely concerned because I was topping most of the internal exams but barely scraping through the externals. They all recommended that if I wanted a first division, I should go by the guide-books.
For the first two years, I refused to listen, choosing to slog long hours in the library, taking each character in each novel apart to analyse and present papers on, reading tome upon tome about Shelley and Shakespeare. It didn’t help – I didn’t even get a first division, forget making the merit lists. Many girls, who could not string a grammaticaly correct sentence together, were way, way ahead. It was a bit of a joke – our little ‘clique’ of girls who really enjoyed literature were the ones floundering when it came to marksheets.
In the third year, I threw in the towel and read the guide books. And yes, I got that damn first division.
And no, I did not do a Masters. I wanted to… but where was the incentive? I was determined not to bother, not in India. Not unless somebody told me about a whole new university, with a whole new system.
How many of us even know how papers for the humanities are judged?
It is a fairly well-known practice, in our board exam systems, that the teachers are paid for correcting answer sheets, based on how many they mark on any given day. The teacher who did 20 sets in a hurry, made much more money than the poor teacher who was giving each paper her complete attention, and managing only 5 sets a day.
Some teachers often give marks based on how many supplement sheets you’ve attached. Assuming that if you’ve written such a lot of stuff, you’ve got to be good. We all know of history students who got away with writing Bollywood film scripts, somewhere between Aurangzeb and Shivaji. We all know of economics students who don’t know the theories, but if you can get the graph or diagram correct, you still get marked correctly. We all know a few mad students who know the whole book, word to word. I am not exaggerating. Word to damning word.
We were taught the concept of ‘phatte marofying’ – use a lot of complex jargon and insert snaches of remembered texts from entirely unrelated contexts, so as to give a general apperance of knowing your stuff, because no examiner looked too closely anyway. We were taught to ‘by-heart’. We were given tips like ‘write in a large rounded handwriting’ to fill up more sheets. We were told to concentrate on beautiful handwriting – never know what quirk the examiner may have: some are known to give additional marks for a beautiful handwriting. Yes, we used to wonder :‘What is this? A frigging cursive copy writing contest?’ But we practised a neat hand, anyway… who knows what quirk of which examiner will fetch you marks?
By the third year of college, we’d all learnt to crack the system.
I’d got a third division in economics, second year – because I completely failed to understand the subject. In the third year, I stopped trying to understand and learnt to ‘by-heart’, and crossed ninety percent. Today, I have forgotten the definition of ‘money’. Two registers full of sociology notes dictated by the lecturer (she didn’t teach; she only dictated notes) and I knew them, word to word. I knew five different definitions of sociology. Today, I don’t know even one. (The only thing I still remember from the sociology syllabus is the chapter on marriage and divorce – that was because I was interested and was reading everything I could find on the subject.) And yes, I got a first division in all three subjects finally… but where was the point?
Why do you think I was trying so hard for a first division? Because that would entitle me to admissions in better, more prestigious universities, where I had a real chance of a real education, better teachers, and hopefully, a better career after that. That is why.
In our country, with our universities and exam systems being what they are, ‘merit lists’ are a stupid thing to argue for, or to base any valid argument upon
