Education matters

I read last week that CBSE students across India and around the Middle East, including Bahrain will have to resit their exams in Maths and Economics because the papers were leaked across WhatsApp ahead of the exams. 

The source of the leak was the owner of a Delhi-based coaching / tutoring centre who was arrested and detained by police. 

The tragedy of this incident isn’t that the thousands of students around the region will have to endure the stress of studying for and sitting the rewritten exams, it is that they find themselves in that position at all. 

What would corrupt someone so much that they thought it might be a good idea to cheat on such a public forum? 

The answer might be more complex than we think, but you can bet that money changed hands at some point, such is the value of the commodity. This is the biggest shame of all. 

The pressure that some schools and parents put on young adults to pass exams that generally only reflect the regurgitation of a handful of facts, but rarely inspire a love of learning, is incredible. 

Most schools do it because they are accountable. If students don’t pass exams the parents want to know why, the head wants to know why and in Bahrain, the school owners want to know why more than anyone, as it is a poor reflection on their school and may lead to a drop in numbers. 

So because of all this external pressure, weaker teachers in turn transfer it onto their students who either soak it up or freak out depending on their confidence levels. 

Once this amount of pressure has been considered, you can kind of see why the Delhi tutor was tempted to sell the answers, because you can begin to see exactly how valuable they are and also how tempting it would be to buy them. What would you do if you were offered such a golden opportunity to reduce examination stress?

The thing about the exam process is that students often see it as a final or defining moment in their lives. This is because traditionally students are taught that the end of each year or grade is exactly the right time for them to pass exams on everything they have learned so far and so it becomes the norm. It is rarely questioned, never challenged, it is just presumed that a 16-year-old is exactly the right age to pass GCSEs because that is normal and no right-minded teenager wants to be anything other than that. 

Einstein said: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts’. 

For sure, it helps if you can pass your GCSEs at age 16, but if students are led to believe that their examination results are final, the pressure rises and the devastation should the predicted success not come, is enormous. 

We have all been guilty of it to some degree, judging someone by their ability to pass a standardised exam, but ask yourself this, would you be a lesser person without your exam results? 

Sure, your job might be different but would your values truly change? It makes you think doesn’t it?