Big marks theory

The results for Std X and XII board exams are out and, once again, a large number of students are unhappy even though they have scored above 90 per cent. To explain, of the 11.07 lakh students who took the Central Board of Secondary Education’s Std XII examination in 2018, 83 per cent passed, and 72,599 scored 90 per cent or more. Compared to last year, 14.7 per cent more students have scored 90-plus. Many will write another series of competitive exams to try and get into institutes of higher education. Despite such high scores, the going will not be easy for many of them. This week, Delhi’s St Stephen’s College released its cut-off — 98.75 per cent for economics, and 98 per cent for science and English — which is marginally higher than last year’s. Other Delhi University colleges are expected to follow suit. Considering that 12,737 students have scored over 95 per cent, it should come as no surprise.

Could this trend of rising marks, also known as ‘grade inflation’, be because students are actually learning and performing better? Not really, aside from the promising gains in some government schools in a handful of States.

In fact, a countrywide fall in teaching and learning standards is one of the reasons for grade inflation. The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2017), brought out by NGO Pratham, shows that almost 25 per cent of 14 to 18-year-olds cannot read basic text in their own language. More than half of them struggle with division in maths.

In February, nearly 10 lakh students dropped out of Uttar Pradesh board exams, presumably because strict measures were put in place against cheating. There was much hand-wringing about the “lack of ethical standards in students”. No one mentions how these very students were cheated of a good education in schools filled with unqualified teachers. When 12 years of schooling do not equip students to answer an examination in an honest manner, gaming the system may be their only recourse.

In such a scenario, an authentic and accurate assessment of examination papers would lead to abysmal results, which could be politically disastrous. Therefore, there enters a culture of lenient marking, using any possible reason to hike marks and claim “success” for the great Indian education system.

The poor quality of school education is also to blame for the “objectivisation” of question papers. Objective-type questions have a standard rationale: Students do not have the language skills to write grammatically correct answers, so objective questions will assess purely their knowledge. Of course, there are some subjective answers expected of the students, but these too are scored on the basis of keywords. It does not matter how the sentence is framed or what it says, marks are given so long as it has the correct keywords. So, even the supposedly subjective questions become objective. It becomes easy then to score 100 per cent even in a language paper.

Another reason for the objectivisation of question papers is the falling quality of teacher training. Assessors who do not have the subject knowledge or language skills to accurately grade an answer paper are given crutches in the form of keywords to search for in the answer sheets. These corrections are so inconsistent that, in the name of fairness, marks are moderated upwards to ensure students do not suffer due to the assessor’s incompetence.

There are many other factors that accelerate marks inflation, including the competition between the various State and Central boards. As long as all the boards supply to the same pool of colleges, each State board will seek to inflate the marks of its students to ensure they get placed on a par with those from Central boards. Two other factors exacerbate this competition to crisis level. On the supply side — for a population of our size, there is a tremendous shortage of higher education institutions, and even among these many are not of the desired quality due to a dearth of good faculty. On the demand side are the aspirational parents who believe that higher education is the only path to financial security. Poor exam results are bad news for governments, too, which fear an angry electorate.

Sadly, this combination of populism and poor schooling pushes the education system into a vicious cycle, removing any incentive for reform. The key long-term solution is to improve school education by providing well-trained teachers. This means attacking the corruption in teacher training or BEd colleges, bringing the quality of government schools on a par with the best of private schools. Delhi schools under the leadership of the AAP government and Atishi Marlena have shown that this can be done.

When examinations become a genuine test of learning, when teachers have the capability to assess an answer without keyword prompts, when there is no need to paper over the cracks in the education system with inflated mark sheets, only then can grade inflation become a non-issue.

Nitya Ram is a Delhi-based educationist

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