Scoring a 70% mark in exams does NOT make you a duffer

If you haven't done as well as you'd like to have, relax. It's not the end of the world. Talent and aptitude aren't always gauged by what the mark sheet says. There is a perfectly good life up ahead, kid

I was in Delhi last week when all these board examination results were cascading in and there was this 42 year-old man who had reversed his age to 24 and got the highest grade in music, written, oral and practicals. His family was celebrating with gusto and wasn't Ganesh Kumar, our boy from Bihar, a raving genius. Except that when the media caught up with him they discovered he knew nothing of even the basics of music. The authorities quickly responded and cancelled the man's results and arrested him for falsifying his name.
One would imagine they should have arrested the ones who tested him and marked his papers or witnessed and assessed his practicals. Surely, they are the people who should explain the faux pas. This is also not the first time. Last year a student topped the nationwide examination in political science but when quizzed, explained blithely that it was a form of teaching cooking.
Getting the kids to pay the price for the wishy washy and absurd marking system seems unfair.
Young Shubh Agarwal of Lucknow got 1590/1600 marks overall and set a sort of 2017 record in his SATs. There is no doubt that he is a sort of genius and hooray for him. But when a 14-year-old is told he or she has reached academic perfection there is cause for worry. The Indian system, in comparison to these exceptions, is moving so swiftly into superlative marking that a 70 per cent mark is considered tragic and languishes in the dark abyss of anonymity.
In our time, 60 per cent was first division and our parents called the neighbours in to share their joy. Today, you cannot get into a decent college programme if you have less than 90 per cent. I recall visiting a friend whose son was sobbing uncontrollably because his 82 per cent mark was not good enough to get into medical college and the parents were bemoaning the failure.
Unless it was math we would not have even contemplated such a mark. In this rocketing up the marks ladder, are we making a dangerous mistake even where children outside India doing these courses are under similar pressures.
For example, there is this young lady who maxed her English paper. Language is subjective. You cannot possibly get full marks unless the paper is a fully multiple choice questionnaire. No one is in a position to give an adult, let alone a child, full marks in language.
In a nation where the English language is no longer spoken or written the way she should and is being robustly replaced by what was once rudely called the vernacular, the basic teaching by staff is infused with Indianisms. There is nothing wrong with this because it enriches the language. But between tautology, redundancy and contradictions, Indian children are not masters of the speech. and certainly not of the writing skill required.
Neither, in many cases, are the teachers. Between mispronouncing 'v' and 'w', they rattle off erroneous phrases like return back, complete halt, total annihilation, advance notice, added bonus, final outcome, end result and dozens more. By this token you do not cope up, revert back, discuss about or send both of you two anywhere but we do it anywhere. Indianisms like bandobust, bandh, gherao, swachh, jadoo, garam masala, chandi, add a spark to speech and the written word and while they baffle others, they add to the quality of expression. Where it goes wrong is when those that teach, use words and phrases incorrectly. Do the needful (no such word exists). Let's prepone the event. (It is not the opposite of postpone though one dictionary has given in to Indian pressure). The class is passing out next month (unless it collectively fainted, it is graduating). He is out of station (a common way to express travelling but totally wrong in context). Telling children to do one thing (you cannot do a thing).
These little pebbles aside, language is fluid and anything fluid can be quantified as riveting, readable, unreadable, gripping or boring but never perfect. Nobody gets 99.9 per cent in a language. When we leave no wriggle room in the arts, and bring it to the level of a science, we are patting ourselves as educationists for stalling creativity. If at fifteen you think you have hit the jackpot there is a cruel reality waiting for you on the outside. Children with these sort of early day marks are made vulnerable to the reality and the fall is precipitous, something that then hits them hard and puzzles them. We were perfect, why has our writing been dismissed as poor?
Because you never were perfect and the marking system misled you into believing you were.
Unfortunately, many of these academically brilliant children fade away because they can never match that boost at the beginning. Ironically, at the same time, hugely intelligent but academically casual children who canter in between 70 per cent and 85 per cent are left drying on the shelf in what is a colossal waste of talent and aptitude. That the educationists in India are not seeing this, and in a sordid conspiracy with parents, have conveniently shut the door on so much rampant genius is one of the tragedies of the new generation. There is also another side to this issue. There is a shortfall of teachers, they are poorly paid, not given the status they deserve and are treated as shabby relatives at a rich man's wedding in the educational hierarchy. Not much incentive for them to be 'creating so much scene, no?"
letters@khaleejtimes.com
Bikram is former editor of KT. Everyday humour is his forte

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