When life throws an exam at you

Examinations stress us out. We all feel pressured to convince an unseen examiner in a few fleeting minutes that we know all that we need to know about a subject. We have to do it in words and we have to do it based on a few representative questions thrown at us. It is never a perfect system. Anecdotal and statistical evidence shows that the correlation of a student’s performance in various examinations and his knowledge/ability is not very strongly correlated. Our brain is not a computer that can churn out the same set of information with same efficiency and with consistent accuracy. We are not machines. We have our good days and bad days. We can be extremely creative and we can be remarkably dumb. The hallmark of being a human is creativity, not consistency and recitative performance. No person is same over a period of a fortnight so how can his or her performance remain the same? We all experience and we all absorb new ideas and information and also forget, sometime for a short time, sometime for ever. In this dynamic brain, how and why should one expect a machine-like consistency? 

But when you have a country of 1.2 billion people, a large fraction of them being educated and we need a mechanism to ensure that they have learnt what they claim to have learned. To earn a degree we need to know a certain amount of information and skills. When in an interview, we need to convince our interviewer that we are the best of all the candidates present. So examination and evaluation become integral to education and employment. 

Then there are other issues. Engineers are required to solve problems quickly and efficiently to a prescribed result. Scientists are expected to figure out how nature works under different environments. Lawyers are expected to know the true meaning of a given set of laws in any specific situation. Examinations in arts and linguistics are a completely different kind -- the vocabulary of the student and the artist being studied are both crucial to define what educated in that subject means!

When teachers and examiners can also have their own biases and potential corruptibility, testing in a fair, efficient and quick manner is difficult, to say the least. Yet exams are a reality. An ideal exam, from the point of view of a student is very different from what the teachers think and what examiners think. 

To a student, a good exam is the one which is a good balance between his ability to prove his knowledge of what information he or she must have and demonstration of that ability to apply this knowledge in pseudo real situations that we call problem solving. To a teacher, a good exam is the one in which it is demonstrated that the necessary information has been conveyed to the student. To an examiner, a good exam is the one in which one can at once judge if the examinees are educated to a level they should be, to obtain the qualification they wish to. To the society the exam should be able to classify students into brilliant- by the ability to understand unspecified and evolving real life problems, the average ones - who can solve routine problems with efficiency and speed and the last group who would need continuous guidance in solving real life problems. 

But in reality this does not happen. Performance in an examination is very sensitive to the state of mind (rather than the nature of his or her knowledge or understanding) of the student. That is why similar exams produce similar broad results but show drastic differences when one refers to the performance of individual students. One solution to this problem is to avoid single point examinations where a performance in a single three hour period decides the future for ever. It is better to have multiple examinations which can result in similar careers and reduce the stress per examination. But that only spreads the stress to longer periods. But examinations and their attendant stress are now an integral and essential part of life.

Competition for supremacy over the other members of a species is built into our genes. We all like to dominate. At individual levels, there are complex personal fights. 

In my student days, this stress began when you appeared for your school leaving examination and ended only when you achieved the level of formal education you wished to have. After that, real tests of life began. Work, personal relations, family environment, failures, comparative evaluation, Kafka-like trials all begin and don’t end till the end of your life. It is a pity that formal examinations hardly prepare us for the real tribulations of life. These are individual tests and individual problems.

At a social level, these tests are completely different. Each examination now is a fight, mental, physical and psychological. They are an elaborate game play to establish superiority of one over another. At this level the game of life becomes a balance of terror. Each of us calculates a strange set of parameters of desire to fight based on the perceived threat, the possible rewards and personal biases. Against this we decide whether we wish to fight or whether we wish to accept the new status quo in case of demands for a change or to accept the present order of things. This balance of terror is everywhere to see. It begins with a toddler to parent balance of terror, to fights with siblings and goes on to the student to student and student to teacher conflicts all the way to parent to children fight and so on. It is a never ending conflict. And the continuous exam that is present in real adult life in the harsh world is a different ball game all together. Success or failures in these exams are only vaguely measurable by comparative standards and the very definition of success is also sensitive to the perspective of the examinee as much as the attitude of the society which is a self-appointed examiner of everyone – and fails everyone on one count or the other. In this, the formal exams perform a small, even if vital function. And no syllabus of formal examination teaches us how to fight these wars of balance of terror and the dynamic war that we call living. Strange are the ways of the world.

Then there are more abstract examinations highlighted by what is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Dilemma can be explained as follows: The police is aware that two friends A and B have committed a crime. However, the police is unable to prove this. If they can prove it, both would get (say) a punishment of a three-year jail term. So the police arrests A and B of a lesser crime which carries a prison term of (say) one year. Interrogating the two separately, the police offers to let the individual go if A or B provide evidence of the larger crime against B or A respectively. So A and B have a dilemma. If they both keep quiet, both will be free in one year. If they speak up against their friend, they go free, but their friend gets put away for three years. That is the broad feature of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The problem has many variants but the conflict is the same – should one be selfish and let the other suffer or hold fast and share the burden of the friend. Worse, what if you stay faithful but your friend does not? That is one tough examination to appear. One can model this in computers and show that if too many people are willing to sacrifice their friends, the society becomes unstable and if there are too many sincere friends, the unfaithful ones flourish wildly and induce others also to become insincere. Played for a long time, the game will fluctuate between many of one kind to many of the other kind. What is true of the game, is true of the game of life.

Strange is this life that produces varieties in exams as well!