‘Objective questions serve no objective’

If a vote was to be conducted, schools would show a clear thumbs down to objective questions in language papers.

Teachers and principals across the board say the new pattern in language exams introduced by the semester system is stunting a student’s ability to think and write creatively. With the focus now shifting to scoring the maximum marks possible, educationists fear the foundation of language-learning like punctuation, sentence formation etc is going to be weak.

“Languages should be learnt only through reading and creative writing. Objective-type questions do not give scope to learn a language, but just give an option to confirm the concepts learnt,” says Rita Mukherjee, principal of CN Vidyalaya (English medium), adding writing descriptive answers gives students space to apply concepts of punctuation like period, comma, apostrophe, colon, semi colon etc. “Writing big sentences or three to four paragraphs in continuation help learn a language,” she adds.

Fr Fernand Durai SJ, principal of St Xavier’s Loyola Hall says language is a form of expressing oneself and objective testing does not help in learning expressions.

Teachers say prior to the semester system, comprehensions constituted the chunk of questions in language papers. “Students had to read one to one and a half pages of comprehension and answer questions. Now, more than 60% of the paper has questions like fill in the blanks, MCQs, match the following and one-sentence answers which don’t enhance a student’s language skills,” says Nilmani Vyas, principal (Gujarati medium), HB Kapadia School.

Without mincing words, principal of Abhijat Vidyavihar, Kartikeya Shukla, says, “If this continues, our students will rot in languages.” Shukla says students have to limit answers to not more than five lines for a question. Short notes have taken prominence. He says the loophole in objective testing is students score high marks which make them feel they are proficient in the subject. However, the ground reality is different. “This mindset should be changed and more weightage should be given to descriptive answers in examinations,” he added.