MARKS, GRADES AND RANKINGS – FOSSILS IN 21st. CENTURY EDUCATION

 

Marks, grades and rankings have been traditionally used as currencies in the world of knowledge and education. The higher they are, the better is the performance of the student. But, can you put your hand on your heart and say that the higher they are, the more knowledgeable the student is? 

 

Now, this gets further confusing when you are marking the students on a variety of subjects and then adding them up to come up with overall rankings. Surely now this grand total is a grand aggregate of the student's over-all academic prowess and it certainly must mean something substantial, like how successful will the student be in his future endeavor and what heights will he/she achieve in life! 

 

Had that been the rule then all batch toppers would have been the best achievers. In the real world however, this rarely happens. Conversely, history is littered with examples where college dropouts have gone ahead to become world beaters, no not in pole vault and boxing but in technology, entrepreneurship and entertainment. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobbs, Steven Speilberg, Oprah Winfry, Ellen De Generes and Lady GAGA are all college dropouts. They showed no interest in the prevailing education system and neither was the system kind to them. But that did not stop them from becoming super successful!

 

Marks and grades are something which we get on the basis of our recalling. If we can recall more in examination, we end up getting good marks. Marks only identify the memory power of students more specifically talking how much he can cram. It often fails to reflect how well the students can think, analyze and deduce. Why do we need these marks and grades then? You will undoubtedly say to motivate the learners, to give them a feedback of their learning and to document their success in a scale which can be of use to higher educational institutions and perhaps future employers. But, that is exactly the problem; this scale does not convey the knowledge quotient. It simply marks out the students who have the skill of passing examinations and have the ability to memorize details that can be regurgitated in an examination and then forget conveniently, as the examination is done and dusted. 

 

Education is something that stays with you after you have forgotten every lesson that you were taught in school. Marks can grade students but not their learning, and certainly not their education. Skillful students don't waste time on anything they won't be tested. I will give you an example from my medical field; bedside manners are not tested in medicos and so it is not uncommon to find an academically brilliant M.D doctor with a poor medical practice. The grading game skews the incentives - passing examinations is considered more important than satisfying patients. So students who game and cheat the system pass with flying colours but are not always successful in the real world of medical practice.

 

I have a feeling that marks sharpen inequalities. Affluent parents can provide more support - online classes, private tuitions, you name it. These inequalities came to the forefront during Covid times when all classes were online. The poor found it difficult to arrange for a decent mobile phone for their children and suffered enormous learning deficits. Our schools and colleges are supposed to be the great equalizers of social opportunities, but alas they have miserably failed in becoming so.

 

Our High School and SSC examinations are actually a snapshot of the academic ability of our students and they risk becoming lasting portraits of inequalities. What are these tests actually measuring - biological intelligence or social opportunities or, even worse, plain and simple luck! Grades truly are only short-term snapshots of how much a student has learned in a given period of time. This only partially reflects the actual performance of students and does not take sufficient account their individual development. Efforts, attitude, skills, participation in group activities, teamwork, leadership nothing is tested. And one must not forget that even this grading may also reflect the bias of the instructor thereby reinforcing systematic bias. Colouring out of the pre-drawn parameter in an art book may be considered ‘dirty’ by the system, but may actually be representative of the student’s innovation!

How to you grade this A or F?

 

Poor grades over a longer period of time would give students the impression that they would learn very little or nothing, which jeopardizes their innate intrinsic motivation to learn. Low marks and poor grades represent destructive feedback for students, since they do not provide any constructive assistance for them to improve. Now, those who have already lost their desire to learn and only study for their grades have no reason to continue learning after they have achieved the best possible grade. So, far from stimulating the process of learning the marks and grades are actually acting as disincentives of continuing the learning process. With marks and grades as destination and not road signals the journey of education and learning is cut short. So, the grading system comes from a psychologically and pedagogically uninformed era and does not belong in the 21st century, the century of unlimited possibilities and infinite opportunities.

 

College admissions are perhaps the best example of misuse of marks and grades. A fancy college of Delhi University declares a cut off mark of 99.9% thus perpetuating the inequalities. The SSC examinations then become the educational destiny of the students. No one has ever stopped to think whether the student with 98%, or for that matter 88% can be even better given a chance! Perhaps that is why German educational innovator Margret Rasfeld criticizes the system of grades and the resulting competitive thinking in schools as unhelpful. "School is there to organize success and not to document failure” she says.

 

Unfortunately our regular examinations do not test across a wide range of skills, and some students do not demonstrate their best abilities in the context of such examinations. So sadly our examinations are often a gateway to opportunities without testing our true skills and abilities. At this juncture let’s not forget that the pressure on schools for students to do well is so great that most forms of course work and controlled assessment lead to blatant cheating in many cases, so that the grades reflect more on the extent to which the teacher was prepared to bend the rules than the ability of the students.

 

True potential of a student is in any case a somewhat nebulous quality, for example there are people who have a great logical brain, but do not have the ability or the desire to follow tasks to completion, but instead get easily distracted and never complete any one thing. How would you judge their potential against someone who has to work harder to grasp concepts but enjoys working things out to the bitter end? There are so many personality strands, which are also often contextual that I think it is a great mistake to believe that you can somehow assign a value to someone’s potential and then say either, ‘you have reached your potential’ or ‘you have fallen short’.

 

The predicament of marking and testing is a wicked problem. Singapore has flattened the marking system as the rightly concluded that it was giving rise to unhealthy competition. New Zealand has a simple pass fail system and not grades. We need to go beyond marks and grades and find out which student is good at what. This is called 'aptitude' and we seem to be completely oblivious of it. After all a tortoise will never run like a hare, a horse will not climb trees and an elephant won't fly, so why should they all take the same test? Every student is bound to be good at something, and the real challenge in front of our education system is to find out that illusive thing. Marks, grades and rankings will not help.