Exam scores, successes and very sick people

Looking at the advertisement of one of the nationwide cram shops in my newspaper today, loudly tomtoming their great recent 'achievement', namely that eight of their students have been placed in the 100th percentile of the JEE (engineering entrance examination), I was reminded of something that I have been pondering over for nearly two decades now.

Ever since the public examination boards started showering marks on their candidates, so that even in English and History hundreds, if not thousands started scoring astounding numbers (I won't call them marks, and I shall presently explain why not), in the high nineties, some even scoring 100 out of 100 - which, as any real examiner with long experience will tell you is simply impossible, unless the entire question papers are full of only multiple-choice questions with a single correct answer for each, preferably in one word, short phrase or date (can you imagine a meaningful English or history exam paper like that?). For at least two decades, I have been watching students who never score more than 65-70 per cent in the tests I give them (despite my having become much more liberal than I was in the late eighties) go on to score 95% plus marks in the board exams. Their mothers go wild celebrating their 'grand success' (it of course occurs to no one that nothing that thousands of people can do every year should be called success in any significant sense), but maybe it should not be called success at all? Maybe it all looks so glamorous because the boards have started quietly replacing actual marks with percentiles? 

Consider what percentile means (a lot of so-called educated people don't really know, or don't want to know). You place the scores of all the candidates in ascending or descending order, then arrange them in terms of percentiles (or deciles, or quartiles). Someone who has scored in the 100th percentile has NOT scored 100 per cent marks: s/he has only found a place among the highest one per cent of scorers. Then let the realization sink in: if the top scorer has got only 60% marks, say, then anyone who has got 58 or 59 will find a place in the highest (100th) percentile, though the fact is that his performance has been only mediocre at best! Yet by this little specious subterfuge, the examiners are giving a chance to thousands to enjoy a bit of false glory, a chance to preen among their relatives and neighbours for a short while... to what end? Tens of thousands of school leavers are stopped at the gates of the precious few government colleges soon enough, which demand absurd scores to give admission (a certain college in Delhi made headlines a few years ago by setting 100% aggregate as the 'cutoff' mark!), so that the great majority of them have to be turned away, and make a beeline for the ever mushrooming private colleges which fleece them in exchange for degrees of highly questionable value...

Indeed, I often wonder. It is a moot question whether exam standards have been declining over the last few decades, as some old retired teachers grumble, but even if they have not, have exam scores at the top remained more or less the same, or is it the case, as I have strong reason to suspect, looking at the pathetic intellectual quality of the thousands I have been grooming all these years, that the actual scores have been continuously declining, and that national shame is being sought to be hidden by replacing percentage scores with the little-understood trick called percentiles? I read a Harvard professor saying some years ago that these days they are having to routinely give As and A+s to the kind of students who would have barely managed to score B- or even C when he was young (meaning the 1960s), and I even have a newspaper cutting stored away somewhere which revealed that a large proportion of Oxford undergraduates couldn't even spell. Maybe what has been happening in the world's 'best' universities has been happening India-wide too? Maybe there is a global dumbing down, and, for reasons that I do not claim to understand fully, we are all involved in a giant conspiracy to hide the shame from ourselves? Maybe it is not an accident that 'artificial' intelligence is booming - the chief reason being that 'natural' intelligence (and knowledge, and wisdom) have sunk through the floor? When I read of a judge in the US awarding compensation to a customer who got burnt by spilling coffee over herself because the cafe owner had not posted a highly visible written warning that hot coffee could scald you, I begin to think that humans might have lost the right to call themselves intelligent creatures any more.

And think of what kind of adults these students are growing up into. I watched a true crime TV show on Netflix yesterday, a real life incident about a young woman (well, actually 33, not all that young) who was a low-level IT worker in Bangalore, earning a modest salary, who had got neck deep into debt trying to live a fashionable lifestyle far beyond her means (apparently a very common type nowadays), lavished money on her secret boyfriend, became gradually helpless, terrified, depressed and suicidal upon realizing that she was rapidly sinking into destitution - and finally killed her 'beloved' mother so that the latter might not have to bear the public shame of it becoming known what a wayward failure her daughter had become. This woman was a fair representative of the kind of 'educated', 'talented' youth who are swarming the streets (and bars and salons and malls) of our cities today, though not many of them take their sickness so far. What does it say about the society which breeds the likes of her in the millions? What does it hint about our collective future? Imagine if the woman had lived on to become a mother and perhaps even a teacher somewhere. It makes me shudder.