Exams are supposed to be the measuring cylinder for your preparation.True,an exam should be viewed as a stepping stone towards the ultimate apotheosis of knowledge.It should not disappoint or depress a student in case one fails to succeed.Stories of Thomas Edison failing a thousand times before inventing the bulb greatly corroborate the fact that unless one falters in a test, success would always remain a pie in the sky.
I beg to differ with those having such hackneyed ideas about examination.That,”Failure is the stepping stone to Success” -I scorn at this crude old aphorism .A student can consider an exam result to be his or her true benchmark only if he or she has complete faith in the evaluation process. Now that calls for a student reposing faith in our education system.I am sorry to say this,but students are gradually losing or perhaps a large section already have lost that faith.
The last decade of controversies surrounding various exam results only corroborate this.But what has shocked me and perhaps many others is that even institutes like IIT and AIIMS, have faltered.In case you are oblivious of what i am saying, let me remind you that in the year 2006, 994 meritorious superior students were denied admission to the iit’s and instead 994 inferior were illegally admitted owing to an error committed by IIT kharagpur in calculation of the cut-off/qualifying marks! . Having a childhood dream to get into IIT, such unfortunate candidates have been silently observing now that their once-in-a-life-time-opportunity dream has been shattered not because of their own mistakes, but due to the large scale bungling by a few top executives of IIT Kharagpur. Error prone conduct of CAT 2009, illegal bungling of scores of 80 students in CAT 2012, are only few other cases.
I could just go on and on citing instances when our education system has been mired in controversies yet ,few realize the trauma and despondency that surrounds one from which one finds it as difficult to get out from as from quicksand-the more he reflects back trying to reason out why he failed the deeper the grave of trauma he digs for himself.The more one retrospects the more unanswerable questions start insidiously affecting the mind.And you become as confounded as your parents about yourself.Worse,as the saying goes you are only as good as your last result is.No matter how much you convince others that you deserve much more than what your institute suggests,people will always value you by your institute’s name Such is our educational edifice that some exams sometimes assume life changing proportions.I hope that our Mr.Education minister understands this and strives to make the evaluation process of examinations,more transparent more convincing,and not just sit with a conniving eye.