Congratulations in Advance

Congratulations in Advance!
Padma Devkota

    Our impatience to share joys with our loved ones almost always gushes uncontrollably forth prior to the event or the occasion that is supposed to cause such joys, thereby inverting the causal universe on its head. At such moments, we live in Alice's Wonderland where characters bleed before the needle pricks them, where fallacies of causal relationships overtake our rationality and render us into a bundle of emotions. Long before the wedding day, we offer our felicitations to the bride or the groom. We extend our best wishes to those who are about to venture into a new space of adventure. We wish a very Happy New Year to each other before the old year is out or a very Happy Vijaya Dashami before the festival is in. Our longing for such moments of joy circulates torrentially in our veins to reduce our competence of expression to a mere utterance of joy.
    After listening to the Rector of Tribhuvan University on TV, I am so overwhelmed with excitement that I must congratulate him for his recent announcement of the twenty percent internal assessment marks policy. According to this policy, TU will allow campuses to conduct an internal assessment worth twenty percent out of a centralised one hundred percent at all academic levels if they want to do so, but will immediately and compulsorily implement this policy at the degree level with the help of the subject teacher. This mark of trust by the TU academic head in the competence of all its teachers is a dawn of civilization on campus for it certainly offers academic respect to all who deserve it. I, for one, would have appreciated it even more had subject teachers been trusted to handle not just the twenty percent but the whole one hundred percent of the examination marks. This would have been of greater advantage to both the students and the academic policy makers of the university.
    I say so because the policy of the Rector's Office is transparent: since TU is unable to uplift its academic face, why not use the cosmetics of marks! And this too against the backdrop of competitions with younger universities that have a different grading system that marks down from one hundred rather than up from zero. After all, marks don't really have to stand for academic achievement; they may stand for various levels of ignorance or even for the intensity of "love" the teachers profess for their students.
    And, how does this policy work?  If Dharahara does not grow taller after whitewashing and renovation, it will at least look more presentable. That is the effect of cosmetics. That is why the burden of whitewashing TU academics has been partly decentralised to naïve teachers whose seats (if they have any) are bound to be set on fire (if they are just that lucky!) by demands for twenty out of twenty in the internal assessment marks. Any refusal to comply will surely be met with threats and abuses or even actual violence. This is a prediction, not an assumption.
    History has told sadder tales than this. The hasty, failed experiment of the mid-seventies points a warning index at this new policy. During a politically more stable and better disciplined decade, the internal assessment system collapsed because TU could not offer any means of resisting student pressure upon teachers to give them twenty out of twenty for the internal assessment. Students threatened resisting teachers with knives and muscles, with threats and abuses, even as the university forgave them all like Christ on the cross. How does TU expect its teachers to resist the pressure of students who have adopted violence and incendiary techniques to score better marks today? 
    I do not believe that the Rector's Office expects teachers to resist such pressures, except at the theoretical level. It cannot, because it has already confessed to me that it cannot offer work with dignity to its academic staff. So, it has fallen into the rut of accepting the incapacity of individuals (including medical doctors) to change the ugly reality of the university's diseased system. Because this much is clear, I have attempted a calculation of the present pass marks for the degree level examination. On paper, it is forty percent. In practice, it is approximately five marks out of eighty, which is 6.25%.
How does this happen? First, since any exam (theses, for instance) handled individually by the subject teacher is not normally scored below ninety percent for obvious reasons that I have discussed in earlier articles, I discount the possibility of any student receiving anything below eighteen out of twenty in the internal assessment marks. This already brings the Master's level pass marks down to twenty to twenty-two percent. Second, the university has a tradition of offering a five percent grace marks to students for any exam. This brings the pass marks down to fifteen to seventeen percent. And, finally, the trend in some departments is to give students an additional ten to fifteen percent grace marks on their own discretion. Let us suppose that the five percent grace offered by the university is included in this range. Even then, this will bring the pass marks for the degree level examinations down to something between five to twelve percent. This pass percentage descends even lower at the hands of teachers who "love" their students. If one may obtain a Master's degree by scoring even twenty percent, who wouldn't?
The private student will certainly lose twenty percent of the total score simply by not registering as a regular student. Since attendance, like pass marks, has a double face by TU standards, it is academically suicidal to remain a private student. Therefore, my suggestions in "Admissions Open" (KTM Post Nov 12, 2005) stand even stronger than before.
The only question that nags me is this: Why does TU not switch over form its present marking system to a grading system instead of using cosmetics to uplift its face? It is daylight clear to the whole world that students who received a mere fifty percent five years ago were better products than students who receive sixty percent today. If the university continues merely whitewashing its face, there will soon come a time when employers and other universities of the world will reject its products as being academically underqualified. TU alone cannot define academics. It has to comply with the academic standard set by many other universities of the world if it wants to carry any conviction at all. Any refusal to do so is anti-nationalistic.
Contrary to the requirements of academic promotion, the Rector's Office has decided what it has decided: to whitewash its academic face even if that means to fall from the academic standard. The cosmetic effect has already brightened the faces of the policy makers and the students of TU. Students obviously understand only marks. The Rector also seems to understand only his term in office, which has to pass smoothly and without any untoward event. Even as I foresee the consequences of this decision, I must congratulate the policy makers in advance for the whitewash that has uplifted the academic face of TU, for the better scores that students will inevitably receive in the next exam as a testimony to their academic ability, and for the garlanding and honours the Rector may receive for his presumably innovative idea.

From: The Kathmandu Post Saturday, November 26, 2005