The trauma of exams and re-exams

Anything controversial to do with the young, particularly students, is like a tinderbox, waiting to be lit. And not handled properly, wisely and timely, a student agitation can cause massive upheavals as proved by the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu that made the DMK such a potent political force or the anti-Mandal protests in 1990, which set important benchmarks for reservations policies in India.

Now we have the anger and protests over the leaked CBSE exam papers, and student protests have once again erupted over the decision to hold re-exams. While some arrests have been made in a coaching centre in Delhi, and there are reports of the leaks first happening in Bihar and Jharkhand, tens of thousands of students across India who took these exams are angry that for no fault of theirs, they are being made to undergo the trauma of taking these exams again.

A vicious system

Trauma and torture are the two words that best describe public examinations in India these days. The kind of pressure our education and examination system puts on the students, not to speak their parents, who turn into mini tormentors during the couple of months running up to a public examination, is mind boggling.

In the weeks leading up to the ides of March, the finance assistant in my office in Chennai, frequently applied for leave and “permission” to come a little late or leave a little early. Every time the reason was “my son’s exam”. As she hails from a conservative forward caste known for its brilliance in academics and the obsession with high marks, as they argue that not being eligible for reserved seats, their children simply have to score very high marks to get into professional colleges, her requests were readily granted.

But when a woman SP (Superintendent of Police) from a backward class who exercises regularly at the gym of my club disappeared for weeks and surfaced recently, with the response to my query: “My son’s exam; I’ll be regular now”, it set off a clutch of questions. The first one of course was why is the onus always on the mother to ensure that the poor son or daughter is banished from the TV, computer, outings etc, and confined to the study table. Perhaps the SP has more onerous responsibilities at work than her husband. But I doubt that he either took leave or stopped his morning walk to ensure the son was glued to his text books.

This is not about women’s lib; nor is it to say that it is okay if the man/dad tortures the child in the name of examinations. If in rural India no worthwhile teaching happens in most schools thanks to disinterested teachers and parents who’d rather use an extra pair of hands on the field rather than put their child through a listless education, which hardly fetches jobs anyway, in our metros and bigger cities, learning by rote has become king. Unless you score in the high 90s, you will not get into coveted colleges, is the dirge.

The wildly successful drop-outs

But when you finally enter the college of life, whether all the high mark scorers excel in their vocations is a debatable point. Thankfully, perched at the very pinnacle of success are people like Bill Gates, who, apart from dancing his way in and out of the “world’s richest man” list, is also known as “Harvard’s most successful drop-out”.

And who hasn’t heard of Steve Jobs dropping out of Reed College to become “the father of all things Apple”? The maverick, but wildly successful Richard Branson of the Virgin group was a school drop-out, and the co-founder of Twitter Evan Williams dropped out of the University of Nebraska. There are many more such cases.

Of course it can be argued that against every successful drop-out, there must be tens of thousands who end up in dire straits. The point here is that ‘knowledge’ that comes by learning through rote isn’t the best kind and the wide universe of children are gifted in a myriad of ways. But in our narrow world view, the child who is gifted in the fine arts and who cannot score high marks in math and science will be tortured by the entire extended family to get good marks which kills many a child prodigies.

Thanks to this pressure, questions papers are leaked, sold for thousands of rupees and then shared on social media! And if there is a re-exam, the entire cycle of torture will start all over again…. both for children and their parents.