Drop Out Exams

It’s high time that the centuries old system of “examinations” to promote and educate the students should be dropped out of our education system. The education system in the contemporary society has been almost a driver of guilt. Such a guilt driven system can only be ineffective, inadequate and inept. Our obsession with examinations, grades and related stereotypes is self expressive of our education borne inability to try something new.

To understand the need to discard the convention of examinations we have to understand the vicious circle of competitions-preparations-grades-dissatisfaction-guilt-and insecurity induced by society. All of these phenomena together suppresses a student to continue to live inside the periphery of this vicious circle, and then we say that we need people to think out of the box. There is no way out along the diameters of this globe, ignoring some very limited exceptions like Finland, where a student can choose to live in alienation from such a stifling state. Students have no choice but to follow and accept this stereotype as a crucial function of the society without questioning. Every question mark on examination is replaced by a forceful period. Before proceeding ahead I would like to clarify at this point that I am talking about exams in schools and colleges not about the competitive and entrance exams for jobs and admissions to educational institutions.

I know it might have been a bit difficult for many of you to assimilate all that you have read above, so let us try to understand the effect of the vicious circle of competitions-preparations-grades-dissatisfaction-guilt-and insecurity induced by society.
Competition and the fear of lagging behind itself is so unhealthy phenomenon that puts unnecessary pressure on the mind of students and propels students to practice unfair tricks of cheating and maneuvering such iniquitous acts. Thus, cheating becomes a socially accepted mild mischief whereas it has the capacity to culminate to the extreme up to the formation of illicit gangs for leaking out the question papers of examinations beforehand and all other sorts of forgery in a very organised manner.

Competitions and the fear of failure leads to forceful preparations but as a matter of fact the preparation for examinations are mere symbolism, as many of the students tend to forget more than 60-70% of all they have studied for examination, a couple of months post examinations. So the society has been failing in its motives of making students “learn” through examination, since ages, right after a few months of every exam. There can be many more loopholes of examinations which we will try to understand by putting up some logic and evidence in the form of studies and researches below.

To understand the loopholes of exams better let us take an example to two female students A & B, who studied for 10 hours before examination and both of them could not complete 40% of their syllabus. However, student A scored fairly well but student B just managed to secure the passing marks. There could be variety of reasons but one possible reason could be the content that they studied. Student A luckily studied much of the contents in the stipulated time which were asked in the examination but student B studied all those contents which were not asked in the examinations. So how can we validate the results of the exam that have issues at its grassroots. This seems more like a gambling game and is not a justified system of testing two students who worked equally hard. This can not be a reason to reject student B because B still has the abilities to perform well. But this is no issue, the perturbing situation is yet to be uncovered.

Despite of her abilities, student B was dissatisfied of her performance which induced the feelings of guilt in her mind, the situation gets exacerbated when her teachers, friends and family somehow, directly or indirectly, make her feel insecure leading her to the point of self rejection. This decreases the level of self-confidence and her day-to-day activities are affected, this in turn again induces the feeling of guilt and self rejection. The vicious circle continues to operate.  In an “A-F” driven society what dominates the psychology of a student is a redundant pressure of examination and sickening guilt. This vicious circle many a times turn into a noose. In India in 2013 alone 2471 students committed suicide alone due to failure in examinations according to national bureau of crime.

South Korea is a highly examination ridden and guilt driven society, as a result of which the suicide rates of those aged 10 to 24 is said to be 9.4, but comparatively, the average suicide rate for the same age range of nations within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is at 6.5. Japan and Lithuania are not much behind in this race.

 The aim of this article, however, is not to give the data about the suicide but to instigate a thought process regarding whether or not we should start talking about a society free of examination and guilt.

Exams and the grade system not only trigger an anxiety, that subtly leads to a less productive human brain, long before exams start but also impedes the development of a free thought process, impedes the development of hobby or a disturbs a regular routine like writing, playing or learning something new for example a foreign language, or something that doesn’t relate to the curriculum.

Apart from logic and the data presented above let us now have a look on some of the researches and studies conducted by reputed institutions and professionals all across the world.

Social research psychologist, Martyn Denscombe, found in his studies that the main reasons of sufferings of teenagers during exams are: The educational or occupational consequences associated with the outcome of the exam; their self-esteem with regards to the outcome of their grades (students are likely to have a higher self-esteem with higher grades and guilty with lower grades); Judgments from friends and parents in relation to their performance; and fear of disappointing their teachers. (source)

According to another study, by UNSW School of Education, Australia, conducted on 722 students of year 12 revealed an alarming picture. 42% of the students showed high level anxiety symptoms high enough to be of clinical concern, 16% showed extremely high level of anxiety and 37% had above average level of stress. Female students experienced highest anxieties. Where does this pressure and expectation come from? Students identified themselves as the greatest source of pressure (44%), with family (35%) and the school or teachers (21%) as the other main sources. More gifted students (47%) than their average-ability peers (24%) identified their own internal pressure as the strongest source of pressure. (Source)

These two studies support my argument regarding the “vicious circle” of examination that I talked about earlier in this article.

In other researches the impact of “stress hormones” which are mainly cortisol and norepinephrine were studied. The studies revealed that when a person move from “cold cognition”  (rational and logical thought process) to “hot cognition” (non-logical and emotionally driven thought process like those at the time of examinations or at times of clear threat or pressure) the stress hormones are secreted from hypothalamus and enters the per-frontal cortex of brain (responsible for decision-making, memory and logical & rational thinking) to clear out the memory and impairs effective communication. At the same time high level of cortisol enters into hippocampus region of the brain (responsible for learning and retrieval of facts and concepts) and kills hippocampal neurons that does not let the brain access old memories and skews perception and storage of new memories. (source)

Nutritional biochemist Shawn Talbott’s research shows that there is 50 per cent more cortisol in the blood stream if an individual has six hours’ sleep instead of the recommended eight hours. It is also important for you to maintain a nutrition-rich diet, drink plenty of water and eat three meals a day; this will keep the cortisol hormone at a natural level and allow you to concentrate fully on the task at hand. (Source)

Scores of stress management tricks have been introduced but none of them have been successfully able to handle such stress and anxiety. The human body has a fixed mechanism to react against any abnormal situation by secreting hormones and therefore, controlling these hormones is not possible until we reach the golden age of ultra advance medical innovations.

Exams can be replaced by other methodologies regarding which I will come up with another article soon describing how and where changes can be brought for better performance of our students and a value-based-productive and just system which will have lesser flaws than the system of examinations and grades.

"Gender Budgeting" - Women's Day Special

While going through "The Economist" (Feb 25th- March 3rd) I read a wonderful article related to "Gender Budgeting". The article titled, "Making Women Count", tried to link the promises of governments in regards to commitment towards the gender issues with finance of the country for better results.

A lot of promises are made during the time of elections for ensuring gender equality but the results are ultimately slack and disappointing. Promises, good words and laws alone can not ensure gender equality and fair participation of  half of the population of a country, like India, in the economic activities and labor force. Therefore Gender budgeting has been suggested as a tool of realizing the promises.

Gender budgeting is nothing but separate financial allocations in the budget for ensuring that the benefits of the policies reach the women, for example, it can be a tool to fight against issue like lower literacy rate among women, domestic violence, gap in the salary of men and women, access to job market and other institutions. If unfixed, they affect the economy of a country adversely. However, when costs and benefits are involved in the promises and policies of a government then the results can be expected to be better than otherwise.

"The Economist" notes that GB is not a new concept and has been sought by the feminist economists since 1980s. In regards to India as well, the technique of gender budgeting is not new. It has been introduced during UPA I in the financial year 2005-2006 by issuing a "Gender Budget Statement" and approving it as a regular practice since then. It has been followed by the current BJP government as well in the 2015-16 budget wherein the government has issued a separate GBS under statement 20 of the expenditure statement.

However this budgeting has not been implemented by all the state governments of India. Many ministries are coming forward for implementation of this policy but still there is a long way to go.

Some of the examples of gender budgeting include lowering of income tax on second earners which encourage the participation of women in the labor force and ultimately boosts the revenue and consumption power of the country. Apart from that child care, sanitation facilities in schools, separate educational institutions for girls for encouraging more intake of girls, a common practice in India, are some examples counted under the technique of GB. Sweden has declared its government as a "Feminist Government". Other countries that follow the technique are Finland, Austria, Belgium, South Africa, South Korea (although the salary gap between men and women in 2015 was highest in South Korea among the OECD countries), Rwanda, Uganda etc. IMF and World bank have backed this technique and are encouraging more countries to follow it.

The demand of the day is that all the state governments in India and other ministries should formulate policies to implement this technique for gender justice, fairer and equal participation of women in labor force and day to day life.

Harvard Doesn't Matter, Saraswati Shishu Mandir Does.

It doesn't matter what you speak but how much you speak. Knowing well that this strategy works quite effectively in India, a prattling PM Modi gave another shot of Tequila to the woozy population of India. He said "Harvard doesn't matter, Hard work does". It was not just a jibe on nobel laureate Amartya Sen who has been associated with Harvard but targeted all the leaders of opposition who have a degree from foreign universities and had criticized the demonetization. Harvard became the poor guy.

This binary could only amuse those who do not understand the meaning of higher education, who has not understood the implications of research. Any thing that happens, happens. This is not just a populist statement made for a political purpose but an ideology which is in principle, "anti-rational". An ideology that demeans quality education, an ideology that trivializes higher education, an ideology of anti-intellectualism. An ideology of RSS that vilifies anything foreign. Ask them about Saraswati Shishu Mandir, they will uphold it in pride with a chest not less than 56" wide.

Connect the dots and you will find what has BJP government done, by the virtue of their anti-education ideology, to an already crippled education system of India. Soon after coming to power they cut the education budget of India. The scholarships earlier being given to the research students for pursuing M Phil and PhD were cut down. A lady with unknown number of forged degrees was made the Human Resource Development Minister of India. All this exposes the idea of Modi led NDA government towards education.

From a cart puller to a marketing guy, from a labor to an engineer from a student to a teacher and from a donkey to a Prime Minister every one works hard. What matters is not the hard work but the quality of work. Hope PM will understand this before the national elections of 2019.

And indeed the hard work did not pay off, the GDP went down as foretold by the "Harvardians" which was later confirmed by SBI report, the markets collapsed and it is going to take at least 6-9 months for the economy to come back on track. Therefore, Harvard matters.

For now I give him 25/100 for his partially correct statement. Yes, hard work matters but Harvard matters too and what matters the most is the quality of work.