Tempered

Now that I have graded some big piles of exams, I have tempered my opinion of the Indian educational system. Sometimes students would write several sentences that they had memorized out of the book that did not address the question that was asked. Sometimes, they wrote verbatim definitions when logic was needed. And, frequently, they could not answer novel conceptual questions. If I chose a problem from the book, many more students got it – because they clearly study the answers. However, when I wrote a question that required application of understanding – bomb. (I have a very few notable exceptions – maybe 5% of the students have phenomenal creative reasoning ability, matched with an amazing breadth of memorized information. WOW! Those few are unstoppable. Students like that come along once in awhile in the US [Yes, Jeremy, I mean you, master of parentheses.].) Generally speaking, Indian students demonstrate a definite lack of overall comprehension and ability to apply concepts. I have a clear example. The question was about how many spectral lines would be formed when an electron drops from principal energy level 6 to level 2 in an atom. I drew the levels on the board showing the nucleus in the middle and started putting arrows in to show the possible transitions (level 5 to level 4 or 3 or 2, level 4 to 3 or 2, level 3 to level 2, etc.). A student raised her hand and said that was not how she solved the problem. I invited her to show me her solution. She wrote out a mathematical formula, which she had memorized, and put in the level numbers. She did get the right answer, but I wonder if she knew what the answer meant? In the US, I would never ask students to memorize a formula if the answer can be derived by thinking about a model.

And teaching middle school is very instructive about where this issue comes from. A question asked how plants draw in water and nutrients. I said the answer was ‘evaporation’ because water evaporates from the leaves and creates ‘suction’. The students went wild with shouts. They said that was not right. They pointed to a sentence in the book or showed me the answer key – which is readily available. The answer, they said, was transpiration. Transpiration is explained to be evaporation of water from the leaves. I said that both answers were correct, and they did not like that at all.

Students copy the answers right out of the key or right off each other’s papers. I suspect that only a small percentage of students actually write their own answers. This is standard procedure. Standard procedure here assumes that copying a few sentences is the same as gathering the information from lecture or from reading text and constructing an answer. The students are not expected to do their own work as long as they memorize. Review for the exam requires asking for many, many definitions of words.

The rampant plagiarism is another good example. Eleventh graders were asked to write an essay on a chemistry topic. I was asked to choose the best ones. With well over 50 papers, only three were not completely copied and pasted from the internet. At least US students know to remove the underlined links and the footnote numbers! The vast majority of students did not even write introductory or closing paragraphs of their own. They honestly do not have the skill to research and write.

The work ethic in India is still an order of magnitude stronger than the US, but I can see why the West is still producing more creative and flexible minds. Figuring out how to produce students with the discipline and memory skill of Indian students and the creativity and thinking skills of US students would be the magic combination.

We will be going home in three weeks. In some ways, the time has passed very quickly, and, in other ways, it seems an eternity. Such is India.