Innovative skills – While in school, when you ask a teacher about the performance of a student, they give their feedback depending on the examintaion results.
As soon as the results were out, the class teacher would walk in, rank the top few students, put the other students in categories they thought as, above average, average, below average and walk out.
How does that prove that the student you’re talking about cannot excel in life?
Is examination the only way to know the potential of a student?
If that is what you think, is the right way of educating people, then I am sorry, but you should probably think before taking up this profession.
The theory behind this ranking is probably that, a student would feel bad about his performance and that would result in he faring better in the next exams. But let me ask you something- How do you fair good in a test, with a limited amount of syllabus? Reading, re-reading and revising the chapters, wherein your thinking is confined only to a boundary.
Innovative skills – If a student performs okay in a test, by not putting in too much of effort, is he not fooling his own ranking? Does this not show that memory holds the ultimate position, leaving innovation and intelligence and aptitude behind?
When in standard 8th, my class teacher had introduced a new way of the seating arrangement, that made the toppers sit in the front and those with poor performance at the back (I never ever sat at the front). She probably, did not want to even look at people who did not have an amazing memorizing power. It’s more than interesting to know that, the rankings, may even throw an odd result challenging the authority’s categorization too.
Exams, no doubt, are an important part of a student’s career. But forming an opinion of the student’s potential based on exam results is something that should be discouraged.
A UNESCO report says that the teacher pupil ratio should not be more than 1:30 i.e- one teacher for every thirty students, so as to make the teacher aware of the students’ innovative and interactive skills. However, we are not even close to achieving the ratio. But when it comes to talking of performance, we very easily speak up based on exams results.
Innovative skills – The fault lies in us. We have always taken exams as the ultimate resort to form an opinion about the student. This doesn’t stop me from saying that we are still in that age where the one who scores the best in school, only can excel in life and the others are just going to be failures.
A necessary evil, aren’t they?
