Editor’s note – The author begins by how meaningless “learning” can be in an examination-based system and then explicates its real purpose and why no matter how bad it may seem, these examinations will still persist for some very fundamental reasons.
Author’s note – Exams seem to be inevitable but why do so many people consider it so diabolical? And what is its real purpose? Are you ready to learn the truth?
Monday morning, right after college announcements and the forced prayer in which we revere the lord and beg for mercy, we’re sitting in our college classroom as usual. Our professor casually walks into the class and writes on the top part of the green board – “Lagrange’s Formula”. She talks about it for a while, introducing us to the idea. It interests me and I raise my hand. A rarity in the classroom. I ask her ‘why is Lagrange’s formula important?’ I mean it in a context as to where it is applicable in the real world and what sort of real life problems it solves. She replies with simplicity – “because it’s an important question for 12.5 marks in the external exam!”
Here’s a banal inside-truth known among those who’ve thought about it for a while – our education system, the great Indian education system, is examination-based. ‘Boohoo, how shocking!’ you retort in sarcasm? Well, it is something that no matter how obvious, still affects every talented Indian student in a negative way. Our system and the society rely on the students’ scores in these examinations to test not only their quality but also the talent and basic worth of their lives. In the end, nothing matters except for what the students score in these examinations. And the exams don’t even accurately measure the competence of the student. These numbers offer the ultimate vindication of any student. It doesn’t matter if the student comes up with an ingenious idea to stop corporate corruption in India or a clever model for the urban sewage system that reduces environmental damage by half. All that matters and all that can save the student from ridicule is if this student participates in the mugging festival that the examinations are and win his/her basic dignity through the marks. And it’s not like the exams are holy and they propagate productive qualities in the students. They merely act as a screening process for selecting the most competitive pupils out of the pool so that they can be processed further for placement in a university or a job. And no, it doesn’t require genius to score in the 99th percentile. All it requires is hours of hard labour, drudging and obedience and conformity to the rules of the game.
Rather than examinations being a functional supplementary addendum to the classroom experience of a student, the experience in classrooms has become a shadow of the necessity to perform in the exams. What I mean is that classroom sessions are examination preparatory sessions. Professors distribute notes for the exam and the whole idea of exams “evaluating” the extent of learning by the student has been replaced with exams “necessitating” the impression of learning in the student. The omnipresence and hyper-prominence of exams in the student career, among other things, creates a fear of failure and through it, forces the students to do whatever is required to save their face even if that means forgoing their hobbies, interests, passion and even dreams. Students promise themselves that they’ll follow their passion once they get past the hindrance that schools and colleges are, but ultimately, that fertile period when innocent and daring ideas evolve is snuffed long before they become “available” to nurture such ideas.
Our society pressurizes the significance of examinations so much so that we need to set up suicide helplines during the examination times. It does this because any individual’s social status and reputation stands on their results in the examinations. The pressures of academic expectations by peers, parents and well-wishers makes many students guilty of having a few peaceful hours for light-hearted activities or any extra-academic life they might have. Why do the students have to go through all this? Does this make them academic superheroes? No! You want to know the only thing that exams make you better at? Get ready for this - the only thing exams can make you better at is competing in examinations, which is a skill that has no tangible value in the real world. The students don’t become intellectuals by merely being able to compete in exams and ace them. There are more efficient ways of exercising the intellect such as indulging the students in real world projects in their local communities that could solve both the problems of the communities as well as provide learning opportunities for the students. But who cares to implement such learning strategies? Why don’t they?
You’ll find the answer to the above question if you dig a bit deeper to figure out the purpose of examinations. Examinations are nothing but screening processes that push down the damaged goods (low scoring students) and take the ones that float up (the ones that learn how to beat the system and get to the top) for consideration for the further opportunities…opportunities to be servile to the system. The whole purpose of the system is diabolically flawed in that it isn’t directed at the welfare of the individuals but is rather directed at feeding the demand of the industry and replenishing it by classifying and hierarchizing the students so that the industry can rule over the individuals and let the social order be sustained. The reason why such a slave-like servitude is not apparent, is masked and even seems appealing to any individual is the fact that all of us individuals are parasitically dependent on the industry for our welfare. We all give our fullest to make it and then we all get to feed on it. And its not like all of us get proportional shares of the benefits of being part of the industry. The higher you’re up in the socioeconomic and political ladder the more you get to feed on it. This is the reason why we observe that the more a society is formally educated, the more the inequity of power within the society. This is too much to be digested in one article but don’t worry, more on this coming up. For now what you got to watch out for is the pretty picture that is laid out in front of you when you go to the “educational” institution and the individual appointed for the role of an educator (who is programmed to indoctrinate into you the information necessary for you to survive in the system and feed off it) tells you that it’s all only for your good.
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