The tyranny of laziness

A deep entrenched laziness pervades all parts of the Indian education system, the laziest element being the examination system, which informs the way subjects are taught. A system is understood as a product of interconnected and interacting elements, which renders a system challenging to change. Collusion in laziness fetches riches!

Keeping a disconnected system

How about a disconnected system, in which elements encounter one another when necessary and retire unto themselves. It makes great sense to have the syllabus, teaching and examination separate not informing one another.

Let us start with the examination system whose job is to set the question papers and evaluate students’ performance, treating each student on merit. There is this instance where an extremely bright student secured less than average marks because the teacher felt that his answers were too advanced for his class!

Probe, probe, probe

The first change is to ensure that question papers are set by people who don’t teach the subjects and based on the depth and breadth of treatment that is appropriate to each level. Arguably, the most destructive dimension of education is the question paper and its evaluation.

Questions at even graduate levels are so simple and straightforward that all that it tests you is how well you have read the syllabus. Coverage is the key aspect. There are just no probing questions where you have to think and respond. Forget probing questions, questions are repeated at some frequency which makes study and preparation intellectually lazy and discouraging of reading multiple sources. Monotonous questions can only produce dull outcomes, even with high marks! And with near complete predictability in the questions, the situation deteriorates even further.

If we felt the need to move away from such a passive understanding, and embrace active understanding, we need a different approach to drafting question papers, which demands a lot of effort. Whatever the level of the syllabus, it doesn’t come in the way of an intelligent, active question paper.

I am saying ‘If’ because it is a choice to be made. There needs to be an incentive system of course but we will not engage with this aspect now. It is understood that few things work unless domiciled in some set of incentives (and disincentives).     

Let me mention the US CFA Institute’s question papers – all multiple choice questions –  as an example. You cannot answer any of them unless you have understood the subjects in an active sense. For example, two of the choices will be 11.7% and 11.8%! If you have approximated your answers earlier than you ought to have, you will miss the mark by .1. That close!

Teachers must feel a challenge to teach and evaluate to produce genuinely educative experiences. If you invest unpredictability in question papers, teachers will have no choice but to teach better going into great depths to ensure that students’ preparedness is appropriate. Students too know that they can’t skim through the subject because they will be stumped in the examination hall.

Non-educational considerations

Often, the stance taken by teachers is that real learning will commence after students graduate because they have to focus on getting through the examinations. This stems directly from the way questions are asked of students with the corollary of what kind of answers are expected. Change the way of questioning or rather what you question and see what a dramatic change it can usher in.  

Unfortunately, in India, quite often, extraneous factors take control over norms to be followed. One of the consequences of such external pressures is the ATKT system in Mumbai University (Allowed To Keep Terms), which lets students move to the next year even if they have not passed in all the papers (but a majority). This decades-old system has been justified on the ground that a student should not lose a year, but he has. It has just been prevented through a policy!

Upsetting the Apple cart

Whenever anyone challenges the way things have been done, especially over a long period of time, the inevitable question asked is – why do you want to upset the Apple cart. The question is invariably born out of fear, fear that those entrenched in the established order of things will have to change and they don’t want to. StackExchange explains the origin of this wonderful phrase: “It is a reference to the way that carts for selling apples are traditionally stacked in a neat and orderly manner. If you pull an apple from the wrong spot, the entire neat stack will fall apart and you have “upset the apple cart“. And that precisely is what I am pleading for – pull just one apple from the stack. Question paper from the stack of education.  

Consider the fact that you have engineering students who cannot explain the ‘How’, aspiring doctors who fail to grasp the intricacies of physiology, students of law unable to interpret and apply the law to a specific instance, aeronautical student interested in vertical take-off but who hasn’t considered helicopters. And so on. This has been my experience over eight years of having interviewed over 2500 students planning to pursue higher studies.

Straight-forward questions should be given extremely limited space in any question paper, if at all. Raise the bar. Who knows, students may surprise us!