'Testing times' over the years!

"Even if I had written the essay and examined it myself, I would not have got more than sixty percent marks," my professor had said years ago when I complained about getting marks lower than expected.

That was the situation prevalent in the past as objective-type questions were not heard of and all answers had to be descriptive. Students were expected to have a thorough knowledge of the subject concerned. In English, for instance, there were papers like 'The Tragedies of Shakespeare' at the post-graduate level and the paper-setter was free to ask any question on any tragedy written by the Bard of Avon. In the absence of 'help books' and the internet, there was no short-cut to score high marks except by slogging. And to top it all, there used to be two papers every day, each of three hours, during the annual examination. The maximum marks one could expect were sixty percent, labelled 'first-class'.

By the time I became a college lecturer, things had started to change. Universities had decided that a certain percentage of questions should be of multiple-choice type (MCQs), where one could expect some of the answers to be correct even if the answers were ticked blindly. When the semester system was introduced later, the examination system underwent further changes. In the agriculture university, where I taught, half the marks were allotted to internal examinations comprising three quizzes of ten marks each, of which only the higher two scores were to be taken into account, and a test of thirty marks. The semester-end examination of fifty marks was to be conducted centrally for all agriculture colleges under the university.

Teachers then faced a strange problem in the case of quizzes. Sometimes the clever students, who had scored high marks in the first two quizzes, would come to the aid of their 'poor' friends. They would write the roll number of the latter on the answer-sheet and vice versa. Some teachers, puzzled by the vast difference in the marks of the first two quizzes and the third one, would compare the handwriting in the earlier examinations and nail the culprits, with unpleasant consequences.

One of the memorable incidents of my teaching career was detecting such a case of impersonation by six students – three clever ones rending a helping hand to three of their friends. After verification, I had left the marks column of all the six blank in the mark-sheet displayed on the notice board. To my amusement, none of the six came to me asking for an explanation. The matter was reported to the principal, who, though acted tough outwardly, believed in giving another chance to the erring students. The guardians of all the six were summoned to the college and the culprits gave a written apology and undertaking of good behaviour in the future. As the news spread, I was spared such an experience for the remaining period of my service.

Today, when students scoring above ninety percent marks fail to get admission to the colleges of their choice, I remember the old 'first-class' students who were sought after by prominent colleges.