Congratulations in Retrospect

Padma Devkota

Congratulations in Retrospect!

    Immediately after the then Rector of Tribhuvan University Professor Dr. Mahendra Prasad Singh announced on TV the twenty percent internal assessment marks policy I congratulated him in advance in The Kathmandu Post of November 26, 2005. Once again, I take this opportunity to congratulate him in retrospect for his pragmatically successful policy. TU has indeed succeeded in diluting the academic strength of private colleges, too.
    Since it is time for colleges to submit the twenty percent internal assessment marks to the examination section at Balkhu, private colleges are obviously worried about their students’ grades. They have only the Central Department of English (CDE) at Kirtipur to look up to as a model. CDE, however, has remained as blunt as ever to the requirements of academic culture. Unable to function in any other way, it has conducted a test for its registered crowd and has decided upon a specific policy of grading: everyone will be given marks between twelve and eighteen out of twenty for the internal assessment. This means that any student who has signed the exam attendance sheet will receive nothing below twelve out of twenty, which is 60%. What a luxury for fortunate students who don’t have to write a single word to receive a first division mark! And, of course, students need not be all present for the test at the same time. Anyone who misses the test will be given a chance to appear for it on demand. 
    And, if they do write something, they will receive a maximum of eighteen out of twenty, which is 90%. A real distinction! No one is going to get anything more than this despite their extra brilliance. And, examiners don’t have to be too careful in reading and grading student papers (which is generally not their habit anyway) because the marks students receive are determined less on the basis of academic performance than on the basis of a collusion between the Head of the Department, a few senior teachers and the representatives of the students themselves. These people sit down together and decide which student gets what.
    Against this practice, private colleges are helpless. Throughout the year, teachers have properly monitored the academic performance of their students. Grades received for each class or home assignment are meaningful. And, students have written real research papers! Most of them have attended classes regularly unlike many of their counterparts in TU colleges. They have participated in class discussions, raised intelligent questions, and made serious attempts to learn. Even during long periods of time when TU campuses were shut down for political and other reasons, students of private colleges were attending classes and their teachers were constantly challenging them to excel themselves.
Given this reality, do students of private colleges deserve anything less than what their counterparts at CDE receive? Examination marks are academic signifiers, not gift parcels. If teachers of private campuses go by the rules of TU (that CDE itself does not follow), distinction is a mark of excellence. The five slots into which TU examinees of the Masters Level may fall are: Fail (0-39), Third Division (40-49), Second Division (50-59), First Division (60-74), and Distinction (75 and above). However, Tribhuvan University, and specially CDE, has made it their noble practice of offering marks as gifts to students out of love for the poor non-metropolitans (this democratically includes the metropolitans!) who have not had a chance to go to good private schools in their poverty-ridden villages. This is how the teaching faculty of CDE broke into three factions in the recent past: a group of teachers who artfully professed love for their students and slandered other colleagues as teachers who did not love their students even as a third group of teachers lost their voice out of fear of having to speak up.
Ironically, teachers who were not supposed to have loved their students were academically more demanding than those who loved their students. This resulted in the student-loving faction attempting to slander the non-student-loving teachers in various ways. One of the strategies was to befriend students and fill their ears against the academically more demanding colleagues. What is a greater crime than when a scholar colleague leaves the examination room after the thesis viva-voce of a student is over and, out of holy love for the student, tells him or her outside the examination hall that, although s/he wanted to give the student eighty-five percent, so-and-so objected to such high marks and gave him only seventy-two. And, what authority does this colleague assume to announce TU examination marks to the student before the Examination Board does so?
I explained the transparency of the policy of the Rector’s Office in my article of November 26, 2005: “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.” Today, it is clear that private colleges, too, are expected to play the “loving teachers” for the sake of justifying the malpractice of the central departments of Tribhuvan University. They too have been forced to say: “We will give first division marks to anyone who was present at the internal assessment exam even if that student has written nothing on the answer paper. We will not give anything over 90% to anyone.”
I am sure teachers are happy because they do not have to read any answer papers to give first division or distinction marks to students. And students are happy because they don’t have to write anything sensible to obtain first division or distinction marks. This is the present reality of our oldest university.
I must congratulate the Rector’s Office of Tribhuvan University for such a wonderful decision, which has led to the happiness of the majority.
Sarve bhavantu shukhina… May everyone (unconcerned for the morrow) be happy!

From: The Kathmandu Post Thursday, December 21, 2006