An obsession with numbers is a national characteristic. How many? How much? These are standard questions that follow any causal statement. This numbers’ obsession is not indicative of greed or monetary fixation, but is driven by the belief that a substantial amount means quality assurance. The recent well-attended and excellently conducted meeting of IGCSE schools in New Delhi, which offer the Cambridge International Examination (CIE) board’s ‘O’ and ‘A’ level exams, also ended in a ‘how much’. The grades CIE offers to define a candidate’s performance in terms of A’s and B’s failed to impress many school and college principals. The rest of the world doesn’t have this myopic inability to accept the CIE grading system, but in India the question of ‘how much’ do A and B grades represent is invariably raised, because alphabetic gradations are not acceptable to evaluate scholastic acumen. The annual declaration of results of the two pan-India school-leaving exam boards — CISCE and the CBSE — and of other state boards compel one to come to one of three conclusions: (i) Schools/ private tutors or parents have suddenly started producing a generation of geniuses; (ii) Papers are not set to requisite standards and/ or marking schemes are flawed; or (iii) 90 percent will become mandatory for entry into a college of repute. In short, 90 percent has been reduced from the status of ‘outstanding’ to a minimum qualification. Tame mediocrity should not warrant or deserve esteem, but never before have eighty percenters been lumped into the ‘mediocre’ category. Separated sometimes by a mere three to four marks from their peers who have hit the magical 90 percent average, 80 percenters live in anxious anticipation of being sentenced to second or third rung colleges. The more fortunate, of course, resort to Dad’s cheque book. Never before has an 80 percent marksheet meant so little or cost so much. The CISCE board has always been disparaged for generosity in awarding marks and it was often rumoured that colleges and schools deducted a certain percentage, to maintain a parity with other boards which are more conservative in their marking. It now seems the tables have turned and candidates writing the class X and XII exams of other boards are being awarded 100 percent even in subjects such as English, and scoring as high as 999.9 out of 1000 in whole exams. Now CISCE seems somewhat parsimonious by comparison. It is obvious that students writing science or maths papers can score a perfect 100. These subjects demand ‘graded perfection’. But a 100 in English is an anomaly. Even a Nobel Laureate cannot claim a perfect essay. Of course the question whether a single set of question papers can determine a child’s intelligence — and according to the great educationist Gardner there are eight intelligences — merits its own examination. Whether an answer paper written on a given day can fully determine a child’s grasp of a subject is equally questionable. The pattern of paper setting in some examination boards leaves…
