Umair Malik
We have been witnessing a curve of high graders sloping upwards in the recent years, supplying a huge quantity of them in the market. “Does this supply cater the demand of the market for a quality product?” is the question of the hour.
It has become a trend for teachers and parents to ask for high grades from students. I’m not against the achieving of high grades but my concern is “should we be focusing mere on the achievement of good grades or are their other things as well that we should really be concentrating on?”
The trend of achieving high grades compels the schools to compete in getting loads of distinctions into their pockets, making it their primary aim to make their name in the market. This race of getting positions and making name in the market induces schools to make cramming skill as their primary focus.
We need to understand here that what is it that compels the schools to focus more on cramming than on understanding and learning.
I feel that one of the reasons behind this trend to prevail is the setting of the question papers. Setting of the question papers is done how students and their teachers expect it to get set. It has become like a precondition to ask a question ‘as it is’ in the text books, without replacing a single word of it. “An examiner should set the papers to check the understanding of the students, not the cramming of the students.” From high school levels to the secondary and from secondary to the college, the semester or year-end exams focus on evaluating the cramming power of a student.
Demand from parents and peers of the students for such grades is also to be blamed for teachers to get bound to teach in a way to make students fetch high grades and meet the short-term demands.
In this race, a lazy teacher, muddied by incompetence, restricts his students from getting their creativity brushed and turning them into critical thinkers and problem solvers. He puts stress over cramming than on learning. “Don’t deprive your students of becoming the product the market demands.” “To deprive them of becoming a quality product is to deprive them of having a successful career.”
Students can’t be blamed. They follow what their master instructs. They follow according to what are they about to get asked in the papers. They adjust, orient and plan their studies according to the atmosphere around, the one set by the examiners and the schools.
I don’t deny the fact that camming is an important skill but it should not be practiced in everything. It shouldn’t be given more importance over learning. It restricts you even from understanding the basics of the things, and when you lack in basics how can you take something farther than the existing- to an advanced stage, when you go for higher studies.
One important thing to mention here is that when you create such an atmosphere, there are some students who have problems with the short-term memory but are brilliant in understanding the concepts and coming up with new ideas, they suffer a lot during this process. And the disgusting thing is that you consider such students dumb, lacking intelligence, and the more serious concern is that even such students, themselves, believe that they fall low on the intelligence scale.
Another thing that i feel is that making students habitual of mere cramming, is the primary reason that students fail to become quality philosophers and researchers when going for higher studies. We see our researches are mere cut, copy and paste type of stuff with sole achievement of turning the prefixes of our names as Dr.
