TO GRADE IS TO DEGRADE

To grade is to degrade

 Sidrah Roghay, Published in The News on April 05, 2012

Aneesa Saeed sits in a quiet room on the third floor of her house, reciting text from a stack of papers that she carries with her. These papers are her notes – they represent the entirety of her educational assets for her school year. Rote-learning every word of these notes, she thinks, will help her pass her exam tomorrow.

Aneesa is a product of the current education system, one in which schools focus most of the academic year on preparing students for exams. Many flaunt the A1 grades that their students receive on panaflex sheets outside their school gates, an act to attract admissions and motivate students to aspire for higher grades.

Though the matriculation examinations in Sindh are scheduled to start today, there are a number of educationists who strongly disapprove of this particular system of assessment, a claim that they back with some strong arguments.

Kanwal Laeeq, faculty at the Educational Resource Development Centre, conducted a research analysing the content of exam papers from 25 schools. She said that exam papers were not actually testing for the things that they claimed to. “For example, a language test paper was not testing language skills,” she said.

“When one speaks about learning a language, there are three things that need to be taken into account: listening, speaking and understanding. However, a majority of the language tests only judged a child’s knowledge of the contents of the books they were assigned; questions such as which character said what.”

“Schools promote uniformity, something that is challenged by creativity. School systems, in general, do not encourage creativity. Even if a teacher wants to teach something outside the course content, they are held back by time constraints,” said Kanwal Laeeq. “A certain amount of chapters have to be completed in certain amount of time; the result is that the education imparted is exam-oriented, not skill-oriented.”

When Salman Asif Siddiqui from the Educational Resource Development Centre asked a group of O Level students, who had received A* in physics and math, if they liked these subjects or were passionate about them, they replied in the negative.

“They told me they had rote-learned for the exam,” he said. He feels that judging a student on a day’s performance, a day on which they are made to “cram and reproduce mediocre writing,” is flawed.

“Exams label students as A class products, B class products and C class products. In doing so, they often fail to recognise the creative spark in a particularly bright student. Take the example of Steve Jobs, a college dropout who the education system had labeled C class.”

He maintains that the state of education is changing internationally, with the private sector in the USA and the UAE beginning to experiment with new modes of assessment and the UK also accommodating new practices. He believes that one thing is for sure: “Educationists globally are rejecting examination as a mode of assessment.”

Mr. Salman Siddiqui believes in project-based assessment and a learners’ portfolio, in which a child selects their topic of research and works on it over a period of time. “This tests their understanding of the subject better.”

“And this would actually be fruitful in the long run, as it will raise a generation of students that can think. Why else are there students who can get full marks in social studies tests, but are unable to come up with solutions for social ills?” he asks. Abbas Hussain, who heads the Teacher’s Development Centre, calls himself a radical anti-exam activist. “To grade is to degrade, having no exams is the best way!” he says.

But this, he believes, does not mean that he is against assessments per se; his belief is that “assessments need not be made in the form of an exam”. However, he believes that before coming up with more creative modes of assessment, the first step schools need to take is to come to an agreement to “negate exams”.