Marks boom and killing cut-offs: Time to rexamine exam system

BY INVITATION

Marks boom and killing cut-offs: Time to rexamine exam system

ANITA RAMPAL

12.09.2021

These are strange times indeed. The number of students this year with over 95% marks in the CBSE Class 12 Board examination is over 70,000; before the pandemic, in 2019, it was 17,000. During the Covid-19 lockdown, in 2020 this figure was 38,000. Almost all (99.4%) have passed. Similar benevolence can be seen in other state boards. In Maharashtra, 99.6% (from among 13 lakh candidates) passed the Class 12 examination; 98% (from among 26 lakh candidates) passed in Uttar Pradesh; and 100% (all 8 lakh) in Tamil Nadu. So what is happening? Why is the crushing pandemic and prolonged school closure inflating students’ marks? Without going to school, without a Board examination, with barely a quarter able to access ‘online’ lessons (not a substitute for education), most seem to have been gifted with a marks bonanza. Does this signal that school does not matter, or that marks do not have much value?

Perhaps the Boards, knowing that the majority had no access to education, did not wish to ‘fail’ or hold back students. This may be an important consideration for an unprecedented year, but the questionable doling out of marks has been happening for many years now, without improving the quality of learning for the majority, and needs to be seriously addressed before the examination system completely loses its relevance.

This year there’s another catch. At Delhi University, there are 69,554 seats on offer through what is called the ‘merit-based’ admission process. This central university draws students from different Boards and from across the country who aspire to study in this central university. The first ‘cut-offs’ for undergraduate courses are predicted to be staggering, with many crossing 97% (an aggregate of a student’s best four subjects) and very few close to 90%. In some courses, seats are expected to get filled as soon as the first list is out, but for others, through further lists, the cut-off is still expected to remain unreasonably high.

So what happens to a young person’s aspirations and opportunities, if with over 90%, she does not have the ‘merit’ to apply for admission to a course that could nurture her calling? What about her sense of self-worth? There are also concerns about the selfimage and arrogance of those with hugely inflated marks who enter higher education, where they are required to think and learn with more reflection, rigour and humility.

Moreover, if even those among the privileged bracket of the CBSE examination — the 5.5% candidates getting over 95% marks (or the 12% candidates getting over 90%) — have to grapple with a sense of uncertainty and ‘failure’ in what they want from higher education, what does it tell us of the majority of all our children? Most do not reach the level of Class 12. A large number is pushed out before they complete Class 8 (despite their Right to Education), while the official data shows that 30% of secondary students (Class 9-10) do not transition to the senior secondary stage (class 11-12).

We are currently faced with significant questions about the value of marks, the quality of ‘merit’ attached to them, and the scarcity of opportunities for meaningful higher education. Michel Sandel wonders why we continue to trust the “meritocratic tournament” that college admissions have now become to better our life chances, even when studies show that higher education in the US does very little to promote upward mobility. An elite private college like Harvard enrols very few poor students so barely 1% go up from the bottom to the top of the income scale. The countries with the highest mobility are indeed those with the greatest equality; the ability to rise depends on access to good quality education, health care and basic resources to support people through life.

Questioning notions of ‘success’ in his book ‘Outliers’, Malcolm Gladwell notes that Nobel Prize winners mostly come from ‘good enough’ colleges, not necessarily from high-ranking ones. He says that research about learning and intelligence shows that ranking higher education institutions ‘like runners in a race, makes little sense’. There are advantages of being in a more amiable environment where a good student gets a chance to be supported by peers and teachers, rather than being lost in a competitive cut-throat swarm of ‘high achievers’.

Sometimes bizarre results can propel us to see the irrelevance and damaging implications of a situation we have been tolerating as ‘normal’. This is that critical juncture. Hopefully, not just people working in education but all those watching or tacitly experiencing it will be compelled to call for a major change. We owe it to the millions of our youth, whose agency and ability during their most critical, creative years is sacrificed at the altar of such ‘terminal’ competitive examinations, at an ‘exit’ or ‘entrance’ stage.

Rampal is professor and former dean, Faculty of Education, Delhi University

FLYING HIGH: Those with inflated marks may also get inflated egos, and an exaggerated sense of self-worth