Not score, aim to make a mark in life

For today’s students, life revolves around percentage. They remain monomaniacally focused on scoring 90 per cent and above in the board exams. A student securing around 99 per cent marks enjoys his or her proverbial Warholian 15 minutes of fame. The icing on the cake is when a student scores more than 95 per cent. Now, they stand a better chance of getting into a college of their choice.

Today’s education system is geared towards judging performance on the basis of over-bloated marks only. It is now assumed that students, who secure more than 95 per cent in the final boards, deserve to study in colleges, while those securing less than even 85 per cent, are dubbed as mediocre and, are expected to study either through correspondence courses or, may be, look for other options. Majority of seats, in most good colleges, in much-sought after subjects, are grabbed by students scoring more than 90 per cent.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, securing even 75 per cent marks in Humanities used to be a Herculean challenge even for a brilliant student. But look, how things have undergone a sea-change today. It strains credulity to believe that a student of Humanities can secure more than 90 per cent marks in most of the subjects, including Geography, History and Political Science. This was not the case even decades ago. The number of students securing distinctions in Humanities used to be very limited. But it meant a lot.

Can we imagine that today in a subject like English, students go on to score an unbelievable 98 to 99 per cent marks? Should one presume that the candidate is a genius and a Keats or a Jonathan Swift in the making? Isn’t such liberal marking a travesty of our education system? Shakespeare or Tennyson would turn in their graves if they came to know about this ridiculous and farcical marking pattern.

In many cases, it has been seen that when a relatively studious Science student fails to pursue the subject of his choice in college due to unimpressive percentage, he has to fall back on English literature or any other Humanities subject to stay afloat in the education rat race.

The million dollar question is: can a student securing 70 per cent marks be considered less intelligent than a student who secures 98 per cent marks in any stream? Who knows he could be more imaginative and creative. If over-bloated marks were the Alpha and Omega of success, then school dropouts like Ryan Gosling, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, among others, would never have been able to achieve fame. They could do this only because, besides being talented, they were hard working and displayed dogged determination to succeed in the cauldron of circumstances. Life doesn’t begin and end with percentage.