How imperfect is the perfect score!

My three colleagues and I were discussing the merits of group activities and power point presentations rather seriously. Suddenly, the aroma of fresh “besan ki laddoo” pervaded my nostrils and my senses rebelled against my effort to drive the brain. We stopped mid- sentence and looked at the radiant faces before us. Their smiles widened as they caught our expressions. One of them said “95.4%” and “96%” said the other with a judicious blend of pride and happiness.

We squealed, hugged, congratulated and dug into the box of sweets all at once! I can hardly recollect what each of us actually said. I just remember that it was a lot of high pitched noise every few minutes because our geniuses (some of whom found it difficult to finish a class test on time) glided in to give us delectable treats for their brilliant results in the class XII CBSE Board examinations.

The Principal was thrilled and she congratulated the brilliant batch over Face Book. The teachers were ecstatic on having added yet another golden feather in their ostentatious caps and declared so on Face Book again. Someone announced, “Three 100s! I am loving it!” Another teacher declared, “First time in the history of the school..100 in music! God bless you child!” A third person announced, “ABC 100, DEF 100, XXX 100, XYZ 100! They all have the perfect score! Life couldn’t be better!”

There was much jubilation among Principals of schools, teachers, students and their parents as is expected. The officials of the CBSE Board probably looked up at Heaven and heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank Almighty! There are no catastrophes and tears. There is only happiness all around. This is the perfect way to conduct a public examination!”

Surely this is the perfect way!

We abhor terrorizing children with public examinations. Their young minds shouldn't be stressed so we remove the secondary school examination. The students of CBSE whisper rather vociferously that the syllabus of an entire academic year is too burdensome. So we insist that the children be tested on what is taught in that particular semester. Too bad if the teacher has taught prepositions in the first semester and adjectives in the other! If she dares to set even a 2 mark question on a preposition, she is taken to task for her lack of sympathy for her little gems.

Yet there are unsatisfied geniuses around. “But that’s not enough!”, they whisper again. The educationists of our mighty nation put their heads together, scratch their grizzly chins, munch away quintals of biscuits, and gulp down litres of tea, as they wonder how to quieten the voices. Voila! The lessons are shortened. Facts and details are taken away, grammar done away with, language simplified…it is all taken care of.

The voices are still not quiet! The numbers of questions in the examination are reduced. The patterns of the papers are changed. Multiple choices are introduced. A special 15 minutes is allotted for “reading” the question paper and 10 marks is allotted for internal assessment. Phew!

Much to our dismay, the class XII, Senior Secondary School examination lives on.

How mundane it is today to score 95% and more. When I went through class XII, we were all happy to get 70%. “First division!”, we would say contently. Just a few years ago, one struggled fairly hard to touch the 80% and eventually, if one did touch the score, the world opened up for him.

The perfect score seems to have lost its seat of perfection and it makes me wonder. If our students score 100 so easily, are they becoming sharper by the year? And if they are, how wonderful it is for our nation!....it’s a nation of geniuses! Yet, most of these bright youngsters fly off to look for greener pastures in the US of A even today. What a pity!!

Or are they really not as bright as the CBSE tells them they are? In that case, does CBSE create a make belief world for them? Would they stumble and fall as they jostle along the path of the big bad world? Would that create mediocrity, stress, cynicism and eventual dejection?

It makes me wonder whether the youngsters are just tidbits to feed the adult ego. Each school needs to elbow out other schools for it must be known as the “best” and so the race goes on…!  While it is the responsibility of every right thinking adult to motivate the youngsters to recognize and reach their potentials and to inculcate the habit to strive, the excessive hype and the deafening din is quite exhausting. Certainly the hard working students have earned all the accolades and the adulation, but just in case there is any unlucky soul who hasn’t written an examination well (for whatever reason), does it necessarily mean that he is less intelligent? May be not!

I have a young boy in my class who dislikes learning French. He would much rather work at the computer. He hails from a business family and he knows that his future lies there. The young lad confided that he has to study French since his parents cajole him to dream of living in Canada. It troubles me. I make him infinitely miserable as I burden him with extra work in the subject that he hates, only because the Principal insists that the school must have a brilliant result.  I am so untrue to my heart.

The perfect score thrusts up the magic bar for entrance into colleges for general studies, thus making admission difficult. It does not even help our students to get admission into engineering, medicine, architecture, legal studies, hospitality etc. Then what do we kill them for? It would be a lot more meaningful if the CBSE syllabus, at least, prepared our children to pass the entrance exams for the various fields! Instead, the harassed youngsters are cruelly shooed off by their equally harassed parents from one tutorial class to another the moment they are back from school. It is “STUDY..PERFORM..SCORE!! “ and it goes on incessantly.

While we goad our students to attain that perfect score, would we be honest enough to tell them that in most times it does not matter? We do not look back or even remember what exactly we scored in a certain examination in class XII. In fact, most often, it does not even come in the way of what we eventually do in life.

Sadly, on the one hand, we ensure that CBSE mollycoddles our students and on the other, we bruise them sorely by tugging them mercilessly to attain whatever we believe should be attained. It’s high time we admit that the perfect score is not quite so perfect. Our children need not hang themselves for marks, instead let them thirst for knowledge and thus reach their dream. We would probably have a much happier future generation!