Reflections

All hail to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing disclosure of evaluated answer sheets of any public or professional examination to students under the purview of the RTI Act! Now this I say, is some real good work! A Bench of Justice AK Patnaik and RV Raveendran upheld the order of Calcutta High Court regarding disclosure of answer sheets to the students stating that answer sheets come under the purview of “information” as defined in the RTI Act! Talking from personal experience of a nerd who perhaps slogged her hours mugging for the CBSE Board Examinations and yet landing up with marks below expectations, a step such as this would be just enough to satiate my curiosity regarding “where I went wrong” or perhaps “where they (examiners) went wrong”! Additionally, if I was planning to give my answer sheets for re evaluation, I would be more sure about the need for a re evaluation after knowing what really went wrong with my answers. It is understandable why the major examination bodies ...

They say experience is the best teacher. And two experiences then are better teachers, I guess. So here are two such experiences that gave me two entirely different perspectives, yet zeroing down to perhaps just one conclusion. The Staff Selection Commission conducts examinations for graduates and post graduates for various government posts, apart from UPSC and DSSSB. Examinations for the posts that can be taken up by Visually Impaired Students have the provision of Scribes to make the examination smooth and accessible to the students. Keeping aside the whole debatable concept of “posts that can be taken up by the Visually Impaired”, here I am going to discuss two such instances when I became a Scribe for a few Visually Impaired persons appearing for the SSC Examinations. During my first attempt at writing the reading and writing the paper for a visually impaired person, I went through three hours of emotional blackmailing by the candidate trying to cajole me into filling up the answ...

Looking at the present trend of Public Private Partnership in Education, it is clear that while there is a lot of scope of such collaboration, it is not being fully harnessed. Education in India can be broadly classified into two levels: University Education and School level Education. Collaboration at each of these levels needs to be handled individually with perhaps little similarities in the collaboration structure. Presently, the most common form of Public Private Collaboration is that the government provides funds to Private Educational Institutions so that they can reduce their fees. This is a crucial step in trying to achieve the goal of Education for All as subsidized education is accessible to more students as compared to non subsidized education. This scheme works well for College Level Education, given the wide variety of students that these colleges cater to. The problem here is not that the scheme is not working properly. The scheme is working just about fine, given the ...

Today, I shall do what women are considered to be best at. To put it in more sophisticated words, I shall express my utter discontent towards the Indian Education System. Though I fail to see any Systematic order in constant strikes, absence of teachers/students from classrooms, exam paper leakages, mediocre infrastructure and ill-motivated classrooms, for the best interests of all I shall keep that out of the discussion. I wonder why we even call it “Education”, when all that we go through is just rigorous training to work as clerks or “Managers” under the bosses of “hefty package” Companies! Whatever happened to the formal definition of education as “a process to develop mentally, morally or aesthetically”? Though I don’t have many memories of classrooms (considering the lullaby that my teachers religiously sang for us in most of the classes), the fondest ones are those of the teachers ranting about how the syllabus needed to be finished (I say finished, not “completed”) before exam...