Biggest concern of India’s education approach is to focus on ‘marks’ with over-dependence on rote learning, pattern of question papers, and digests
The results of the qualifying exams for the 80 odd posts of accountants in the Directorate of Accounts for Government of Goa were a great shocker.
The 100% failure for 8000 students appearing could match only two such instances in contemporary history. First, all 500 law graduates failing to qualify for 16 vacancies of Asst. Law Officer at the BMC in Mumbai in 2017 and second being not one of the 25,000 applicants passing the admission test at the University of Liberia (West Africa) in 2013. In case of Liberia the students fared badly in English and Maths while in case of BMC, in General Knowledge and Reasoning ability.
Shamefully for all of us, the test for accountants in Goa got the dubious distinction as of one of the toughest to crack. In India over 4 lakh candidates apply each year for the IAS from which over 2000 are finally interviewed and half selected while in 2017 around 11000 were admitted to the IIT’s out of 12 lakh writing the JEE. On the same note around 10% of students qualified the final examinations of the chartered accountancy programmes this year.
Since the essential requirement for said post was graduation in commerce/economics, how fair was it for the exam conducting body to conduct the qualifying test when they are mandated to prescribe the syllabus and handle exams only for Std X and XII is the question.
If one believes that syllabus for the exam was reportedly based on the levels of Std XII and given that the syllabus and examinations for this classes are conducted by the same exam conducting body itself, the onus of not adequately preparing the students primarily rests with the same body, rather than with the colleges/university where the applicants studied. If the test was perceived by the candidates as “tough”, the question is whether the difficulty level was pre-defined as per the standards or not? The globally accepted norm is that 15-20% marks are to be allocated for difficult questions, 10-15% intended for any students, and around 60-70% for fairly average students to answer. Many candidates also expressed that the questions asked were “out of syllabus”. Whether it was, or wasn’t, this concern was ought to be addressed earlier not after 7 months after the exams.
There exists a well-accepted mechanism to award proportionate marks to candidates in such cases but it was not done here. The DoA also failed to subsequently put the question paper along with model answers in public domain to set to rest all apprehensions.
Apart from the above acts of commission the education system and the students per se are also to be charged with the errors of omission and of ignorance, respectively. The issue for education system is to ponder whether the education or such job qualifying exams actually test the job proficiency skill or not? The Committee for Economic Development of Australia for instance, in an effort build a future-proofed workforce suggests shunning test of memorising, writing and arithmetic skills and instead questioning the 4 “Cs” of creativity, critical thinking (application of knowledge), collaboration and communication.
To be more specific, for the job of accountants in question a test of technical competencies of the profession could have added value. In this connection the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) has identified some essential competencies for accountants in terms of being able to apply verifiable measurements to analyze data, ability to manage risk, to create appropriate content and communicate it clearly, ability to search and research, ability to understand systems, and process data using relevant tools, as the ones ought to be tested.
The Gurugram-based ‘Stones2Milestones’ surveyed 9,765 children in 20 states via 106 urban and semi-urban schools and found that only around 10% of Indian students show full and detailed understanding of texts in a reading assessment and about they not being able to comprehend Math problems, rather than not being able to solve it. Our daily experiences show that the reality is not so different from the above findings. The inability of our failed to be accountants to apply basic Math and English skills suggests that they were moving from one class to the next without learning what they should have, making them fall behind now.
Biggest concern of India’s education approach is focus on ‘marks’ with over-dependence on rote learning, pattern of question papers, and digests. General reading is rarely identified as a priority and things not specifically mentioned in class is considered to be out of syllabus regardless of it being the part of the context. The education system rarely even bothers to think about what our students are actually learning.
The obvious result is rightly answered by Professors Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum to the question whether students learn in college?
To this authors of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” mention, ‘not much’. They go on to add that when it comes to challenging undergrads, colleges and universities come up short and students are left uninvolved and academically unchallenged.
Leaving aside discussions about issues of politics, “extraneous” things like bribes, favouritism or the failures by the exam conducting body; it seems that it is the present education system that has failed the students. The learning is that our acts of omissions did the damage while we may gracefully forgive the sin of ignorance of those who answered exams without adequate preparation.
