SIBALISM, MAKING LIFE MERRIER FOR THE GENX..???

Imagine this …
You are a 10th grader , sitting tight & studying day in & day out for your board exams. Suddenly, one fine day, you realize something unusual at your doorstep! A beautiful gift box… gift wrapped with the finest & the most vibrantly colored satin. You open it to find a parchment in it. The parchment is decorated at its edges with glitter ink. Inside the parchment, the wordings in bold & italics read
“Class X board exams made optional.
No compulsion! Choice open to the student. Absolutely no side effects … ”
WITH REGARDS ,
THE UNION HRD MINISTRY
What would be your instantaneous reaction to this? surprise? shock? I bet you would cherish this one more than a “Corner House treat” or any Nike\RBK gear as a surprise birthday gift. Well if things are to go the way drafted & if GOD decides to stay by you, you (a 10th grader) will be getting that gift anytime soon!
The Union HRD minister Mr.Kapil Sibal is all set to make a major, debatable rejig in the educational system of India. He has plans to scrap the Class X board exams, introduce a common board (deleting all the state boards) & invite more private players to the higher education arena. Some maverick moves by the HRD minister. Though the 2nd & 3rd seem a good move, it’s the 1st that’s attracted a lot of questions & risen many debates. Not many educationalists in the country like this idea of the minister to scrap the board exams (or to be more precise make it optional). And guess whats the reason behind this daring act? “Detraumatising the life of the students & the parents.” (now where was this issue of trauma & stress when I was giving my board exams ?!)
Though the minister might attained instant adulation & a big fan-following from the student community, many learned call this decision “highly absurd”. From times immemorial, the Class X board exam has proved to be a major benchmark in every student’s life. It’s a threshold , a gatepass for higher education (or atleast this is how my parents describe those exams. I too endorse it, now that I have gone through all those hardships!) So, if such an exam’s scrapped, then how do you guage a person’s literacy? I bet you can’t completely rely on the school internal exams. I can give you a thousand instances where favoritism & biasing has played a role when it came to awarding marks in school exams. Any disagreement with this point? I hope not. And I don’t understand what’s all this trauma, stress, burden on the part of the students due to the exams. I feel it’s a little over-rated. If they are to proceed in the way they’ve started, then probably one fine day, they’ll scrap all the exams even at the degree level and you’ll (or atleast your children will) get your professional’s degree even without facing a single so called “traumatizing” exams. (frankly, I don’t mind something like this only if its going to be implemented within another 2 month’s time, I mean before my 5th sem classes commence! But more musing reveals the fact that even this kind of a situation wont load off my mind or do anything miraculous in my case where we have a sem-end exam paper set by our college lecturers, which is a fine collection of the most ulterior, apprehensive, ultra-cryptic, anomalous questions in the whole universe! Just to give an insight, you are given a theory question to answer for 10 marks in a subject that’s strictly programming & even the best of the reference books has only 5 lines of info in it! You have to make up the rest of the story to be worth 10 marks!) now forget my case for the time being, I know its so melancholic & heart-trending! But I’m afraid there’s very little you can do about it. So by my reckoning, life will only become more petrifying without these board exams.
A board exam is one arena which instills the spirit of competition in the students. It gives them a chance to associate & compete with peers not just confined to his/her school, but the whole territory/ nation. Though it may be branded a drudge or an ordeal, but still its worth all the stress & strain because facing such exams helps students analyse & assimilate their strengths & weaknesses. It forms a well defined scale to track their progress. Tough stuffs like exams prepare the young to face the real world, full of competitors, the fight for opportunities. Most importantly, they help us transform better from a novice to a virtuoso. So, I feel exams are as important as any other aspect in the education system. Also, in a country like ours, respected globally for the dexterity of the folks & their enormous mental abilities, anything making the schooling, collegiate education easy will prove to be too costly a price to be paid towards the end. So, instead of thinking about scrapping exams, let the authorities muse about improving the quality of education, introducing new & industry-oriented subjects, updating the syllabi every now & then, giving more grants to the universities, offering more fellowships & scholarships to the talented lot. Make education modern, not casual. Make knowledge reachable to all, affordable by the masses. By traversing in such path, can we help in India’s progress. So, lets all strive for it. Lets take India to greater heights…