SORRY STATE OF HIGHS AND LOWS

Admission to Delhi University colleges opens on June 1. While the cut-off percentages for this year are yet to be announced, if the last few years are any indication, entry isn’t going to be easy. Because it is in the national capital,

DU is on the priority list of students not just in the city, but from across the country. Last year St Stephen’s set a first cut-off of 99 per cent for admission to English (Honours). The first cut-off for Economics was 98.5 per cent. For admission to Computer Science, the first cut-off in many DU colleges was 100 per cent. Latika Panghal, whose twins – one son and one daughter – scored 94.5 per cent this year, has made her peace with the fact that they might not find a berth in one of DU’s better colleges. The twins, both of whom studied Commerce, will be sent abroad for further studies.

The real problem here, feels Joshi, are not the soaring scores, but the use of these scores as license for college entry. “We need to differentiate between exit and entrance examinations. Class 10 and 12 serve as exit exams and are not competitive exams. Whereas entrance exams are competitive and students should prove themselves in order to get admission to any college,” agrees Sreekanth. The number of colleges compared to the number of students is another stumbling point.

A total of 10,67,900 appeared for the CBSE class 12 exams this year, of which 92 per cent cleared the tests. The maximum number of students who appeared for the exams were from Delhi. In comparison, there are only 63 colleges in Delhi University with a total of 54,000 seats. Many private universities have opened up, such as Ashoka, OP Jindal and Shiv Nadar and may take some of the burden off DU.

The pressure to perform and the scores – high and low – impact students in various ways. Kumar’s phone has not stopped ringing since the results were announced. “Those who get what they consider low scores according to the new standards, often suffer from low self -esteem,” she says. But the high-fliers aren’t without their own set of problems. “Such high scores often make them over-confident. They lose the urge to excel,” she says. Kumar’s advice to parents in the last one week since the publication of the CBSE class 12 results has been to read Vasant Kallola’s It’s Okay to Fail My Son – a book where the protagonist prepares his son to rise above the mediocre. The system needs to stop stamping everyone with the uniform definition of success. Today that definition is a 99 per cent CBSE score. VINEET JOSHI, educationist, formerly associated with CBSE YAGNAMURTHY SREEKANTH, NCERT

Mitali Gopani, a student in Mumbai, scored 88.83 per cent in her Class 12 Higher Secondary (HSC) exams under the Maharashtra Board last year, putting her third in her class at Jai Hind college. She still almost didn’t make it into the course of her choice — Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting and Finance).

“I had studied hard all year and scored well, but the cut-off was 91 per cent,” says the 20-year-old. “I was waitlisted, and the wait was agonising. Thankfully there were a few empty seats left after the three merit lists came out and Igot a seat.”

As a parent it is difficult to see your child suffer this kind of stress, says Mitali’s father, Rakesh. “And it’s stressful for us too. There should be a way to ensure that marks are actually indicative of aptitude and not just freely dispersed.”

In Maharashtra, many more students take the HSC state board exam instead of the all-India CBSE and ISC — indeed the number is pegged as almost 80 times more.So results season is an annual face-off.

All-India Board examiners are known to be more liberal with their marks, so these students score much more than their counterparts from the state boards. As a result, in Mumbai, even those who top their institutes in the state’s HSC board exams may find it difficult to get into the stream of their choice in the college of their choice.

Most states in the country have their own state Boards. While examination and evaluation patterns vary across the different Boards, most are known to be less liberal with marks than CBSE and ISC. There are exceptions though. As many as 9,870 class 12 students scored A grade in all subjects in the Kerala Board this year. Out of these 125 students scored 100 per cent marks. The West Bengal Board, traditionally known for its tough marking, is trying to change to keep up with CBSE and ISC. The Higher Secondary (HS) topper from West Bengal Board scored 99 per cent this year, while

0.6 per cent of HS candidates scored above 90 per cent marks. Comparatively though, more students from CBSE and ISC continue to score in nineties than those from the state Board.

Teachers across the country feel that the soaring scores create an unhealthy degree of competition among students. “It’s become so intense, it’s down to every .001 percent difference,” says Deepshikha Srivastava, principal of Mumbai’s Rajhans Vidyalaya CBSE board school and junior college. In Mumbai, as top scores have risen across Boards, colleges have seen cut-offs rise by as much as 7 percentage points in the last year. “The current system is hurting a lot of bright students because they are left feeling they’re not really intelligent, based on their percentage scores,” adds Ashok Wadia, principalof Jai Hind College. What’s needed urgently, say principals, is a more uniform syllabus leading to a more uniform marking system across Boards.

If the question paper has not been designed properly, a high score does not indicate a good knowledge of the subject, but a good knowledge of the answers to the questions being asked We need to differentiate between exit and entrance examinations. Class 10 and 12 serve as exit exams and are not competitive exams, whereas entrance exams are competitive

With inputs from Joanna Lobo; Mou Chakraborty and Ramesh Babu