Tag: education

RG@ICSE,ISC

I did my higher education at two “institutes of national importance”. Both institutions followed what is called “relative grading”. It didn’t matter on an absolute scale how well or how badly you did. Your grade for the course would depend on how everyone else who took the course did. So for example, there was this one course at IIT Madras where I got 80/100, and got an S grade (the highest grade possible). The general performance of the class had not been great, so in that course 80 merited an S. In another course, however, 80 fetched me only a B (the third highest grade) – the general performance of the class had been much better.

While IITs and IIMs and some other autonomous institutions practice relative grading, it is not the “done thing” in most of the rest of India. Most of our board and university exams follow what is known as “absolute grading” – your grade for the course depends solely on your performance, without taking into account the performance of others. So it is theoretically possible to have a case where practically everyone in the class scores “90%”. Given that this is the prevailing system of grading in most of India, we assume that the board exams follow this principle, too.

Two or three days back, Debarghya Das, a student at Cornell set a cat among the pigeons by scraping the marks of every single student who took the ICSE or ISC exams (10th and 12th board respectively administered by the CICSE). What he noticed was that certain marks had gone missing – for example nobody scored 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91 or 93 in any of the courses.  This is just a sample of marks that have gone missing. There are several other numbers which are effectively “unattainable” in any of the courses. Das, on his account, has alleged some kind of “fraud”.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see this rather jagged distribution? I wouldn’t blame you if you saw a hedgehog. But can you think of a graph that looks like that?

Three years back I bought myself a DSLR camera, after which I pretend to be an expert photographer. I even use Photoshop/Gimp to manipulate some of the images I click. And a decidedly much better photographer friend has told me that the first thing you do while editing a photo is to adjust “levels”. See this to know what you can do with levels. Basically, the concept is that some parts of the colour spectrum are unrepresented in an image, and by adjusting levels you make sure the full spectrum is used, thus improving the contrast of the image.

There is something known as the image histogram. I took a picture that I had shot and adjusted the “levels”. On the left you see what the histogram looks like after the levels. On the right, you see the histogram as it was before you adjusted the levels.

Image histogram after (left) and before (right) adjusting the levels of an image. From a random photograph I had shot
Image histogram after (left) and before (right) adjusting the levels of an image. From a random photograph I had shot

Doesn’t the histogram on the left remind you of the distribution of ICSE/ISC marks? And how did we get that histogram? By taking the histogram on the right (which is smoothed but all bunched up in one part of the distribution) and stretching it so that it falls across the entire distribution. And what happened when we did that? We got gaps, as you can see in the histogram on the left or the distribution of ICSE/ISC marks.

There is an article in The Hindu today that again explores this issue of missing marks in ICSE/ISC. In that the ICSE council, which administers these exams is quoted saying:

 “In keeping with the practice followed by examination conducting bodies, a process of standardisation is applied to the results, so as to take into account the variations in difficulty level of questions over the years (which may occur despite applying various norms and yardsticks), as well as the marginal variations in evaluation of answer scripts by hundreds of examiners (inter-examiner variability), for each subject.”

Another money quote from the same article:

“The word tampering is wrong. There is moderation that happens across education boards,” explained a teacher, who has worked with ICSE schools in Hyderabad and Chennai. “After the first round of corrections, raw data is given to officials and head examiners who analyse how students have performed. They try to ensure the bell curve of the results does not look awkward. If it does, the implication is that the checking has been either too liberal or very strict.”

So there you go. The ICSE Council effectively follows relative grading. There is a certain distribution of marks that they desire, and they adjust the “levels” of the overall distribution of marks so that the desired distribution is achieved. The desired distribution of marks is something like “X% students get between 95 and 100, Y% get between 90 and 95”, and so on. Now, two students who had got the same number of marks as per the initial marking have to get the same number of marks after recalibration. So what the missing marks indicates is that there was clustering – a large number of students had ended up scoring in the same narrow range, and so after normalization, this range got expanded because of which you have gaps. Now, when certain sections of the range in the middle are expanded, some at the end have to get contracted (for example, if someone who originally got 70 is given 90, a person who originally got 90 deserves so much more). Which is why you see that at one end – 94-100 all possible marks are represented.

This still doesn’t explain one thing though – why is it that the same marks have gone missing in all subjects? It is impossible that the initial distribution of marks was identical across subjects. I have only one explanation for this – there was one overall mapping algorithm that was used across subjects, that converted marks obtained to the relative marks. This is also seen in the fact that the shape of the distribution across subjects varies widely (again refer to Das’s post).

So that explains the weird distribution of marks in the ICSE / ISC exams. But what explains the title of the post? In IITian English, “RG” is a term derived from “relative grading”. It is a rather derogatory term used to describe people who prefer to pull down others in their quest to get ahead (note that this is a consequence of relative grading). Taking some more liberties and using IITian English, you can say that the ICSE/ISC board has “RGed” students!

Push and Pull Teaching

I’m writing this in the context of the Right to Education Act coming into force this year. The reason I use a musical example upfront is that music is the only thing I’ve tried to learn formally in recent times. While I use the example to illustrate the problem with the traditional Indian learning system, I refer to more basic and general education in this post. 

So about a month back I decided I need to add to my education in Carnatic and Western Classical Music and decided to learn Hindustani Classical. I decided it was time to learn a new instrument (so far I’d been trained only in playing the violin) and after some facebook queries, found a teacher who lived close by. After a lecture in how he teaches to take forward a “parampara” and not for money, and that he expects extreme devotion from students, and that he likes to begin classes for a new student only on a Monday, classes began in right earnest.

Classes soon hit a roadblock, though. As the more perceptive of you here might be aware, I have (I don’t want to use the word “suffer”) ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder), thanks to which my attention span is grossly lower than that of the normal human being. Weeks together of simply going up and down the (Bilawal) scale soon got to me and I lost interest in practicing. Soon I realized I had started to look for excuses to bunk classes. I decided to cut my losses and decided to discontinue class.

Before I discontinued class, however, I  thought long and hard about telling my teacher about my ADHD, and that his methods of teaching weren’t working out for me. I wanted to tell him about the Suzuki method which my Western Classical teacher had adopted a year ago, which kept me interested in the music without relaxation of rigour. The Suzuki Method had worked fantastically well for me. Each class I would learn a new (simple) song – for example, I started my Western Classical learning by learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

There are times when I think that I should have given my sitar teacher a fairer chance and explained to him about the Suzuki method and adopt something like it for the Sitar. However, from my knowledge of him based on my intereaction with him for a month or so, it didn’t seem like it would work, and I ended up (regretfully) quitting without giving him a chance to push the education on me.

The thing with traditional Indian learning is that it is fundamentally “pull”. The onus is on the student to convince the teacher to take him on as a student, and then to extract knowledge and wisdom from the teacher. In the traditional Indian context, it is absolutely okay for the guru to be aloof and disinterested, for it is not his duty to teach – it is the student’s duty to extract knowledge from the teacher. In fact my friend and colleague Nitin Pai informs me that according to the Upanishads, it is the duty of the teacher to reject a student the first three times he “applies”, and accept a student only after he has sucked up considerably.

While there might have been good reasons for such teaching practices back in the Vedic and Puranic ages (for example, the caste system forbid considerable sections of the population from learning the scriptures), these practices are wholly unsuited for the modern age where the focus is on increasing the reach of education and and ensuring that more people have access to education.

With the onus being on universal education and on getting every child to learn, we need to get rid of the “Acharya Devo Bhava” (teacher is god) paradigm and instead shift to a framework  of professional teachers where it is the teacher’s duty to reach out to the student. We need to get to a paradigm where the students can demand that the teacher reach out to them and teach them, and where students don’t need to suck up to the teacher.

The “acharya devo bhava” concept might have served us well in the pre-writing age and ensured that our most important scriptures were transmitted down to an era where they could be written down. This paradigm, however, is not scalable, and definitely not suited to a situation where the objective is to provide education to everybody.

Flawed though it may be, the Right to Education Act is a good step by the Union Government to ensure greater learning among kids and to maximize our chances of making good of the demographic dividend. The measure, however, will be dead on arrival unless the mindset of teaching and learning is changed.

The Aditya Birla Scholarship

I spent this evening attending this year’s Aditya Birla Scholarship awards function. Prior to that, there was a networking event for earlier winners of the scholarship, where among other things we interacted with Kumaramangalam Birla. Overall it was a fun evening, with lots of networking and some nostalgia, especially when they called out the names of this year’s award winners. My mind went back to that day in 2004, as I sat confident but tense, and almost jumped when I heard my named called out only to realize it was another Kart(h)ik!

You can read more about my experiences during that award ceremony here (my second ever blog post), but in this post I plan to talk about what the scholarship means to me. During the networking event today, one of the winners of the scholarship (from the first ever batch) talked about what the scholarship meant to him. As he spoke, I started mentally composing the speech I would have delivered had I been in his place. This blog post is an attempt to document that speech which I didn’t deliver.

People talk about the impact the scholarship has on your CV, and the bond that you form with the Birla group when you receive the scholarship. But for me, looking back from where I am now, the scholarship has primarily meant two things.

Back in the day, the scholarship covered most of my IIM tuition fee. When I’d joined IIM, my parents had told me that they wouldn’t fund my education, and I had taken a bank loan. However, the scholarship covered Rs. 2.5 lakh out of the Rs. 3 lakh I needed for my tuition fee, and the loan that I had taken for the remaining amount was cleared within a couple of months after I worked.

My first job turned out to be a horror story. It was six years before my ADHD would be discovered, but I was in this job where I was to put in long hours under extremely high pressure, and deliver results at 100% accuracy. I wilted, but refused to give up and pushed myself harder, and I’m not sure if I actually burnt out or only came close to it. But it is a fact that one rainy Mumbai morning, I literally ran away from my job, purchasing a one-way ticket to Bangalore and refusing to take calls from my colleagues until my parents told me that my behaviour wasn’t appropriate.

While my parents were broadly supportive, the absence of liabilities made the decision to quit easier. Of course I still had the task of finding myself another job, but I knew I would pull through fine even if I didn’t find another job for another six months (of course, I had saved some money from my internship at an investment bank, but the lack of liabilities really helped). The Aditya Birla Group, by funding my business school education, played an important role in my being free or financial obligations, and being able to chart out my own path in terms of my career.

My six-year career has seen several lows, aided in no small amount by my ADHD and depression, both of which weren’t diagnosed till the beginning of this year. I got into this vicious cycle of low confidence and low performance, and frequently got myself to believe that I was good for nothing, that I had become useless, and that I should just take some stupid steady job so that I could at least pay the bills.

During some of these low moments, my mind would go back to that day in September 2004 when I (at the end of the day) felt at the top of the world, having been awarded the Birla scholarship. I would then reason, that if I was capable of convincing a panel consisting of N. Ram, N K Singh and Wajahat Habibullah to recommend me for the Aditya Birla scholarship, there was nothing that was really beyond me. Memories of my interview and the events of the day I got the scholarship would make me believe in myself, and get me going again. Of course on several occasions, this “going again” didn’t last too long, but on other occasions it sustained. I credit the Aditya Birla scholarship for having given me the confidence to pull myself back up during the times when I’ve been low.

These are not the only benefits of the scholarship, of course. The scholarship has helped build a relationship with the Aditya Birla group. In the short run, when I won the scholarship, it helped me consolidate my reputation on campus. And last but not the least, it was a major catalyst in reviving a friendship which had gone awry thanks to some of my earlier indiscretions. Most important, though, was the financial security that scholarship offered, which made potentially tough decisions easier, and the confidence it offered me which has carried me through tough times.

 

On age and experience and respecting elders

A lot of commentary about the financial crisis of 2008 spoke about there not being anyone around who had experienced the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American Economy was largely stable till the end of the 1970s, they had argued, because the memory of the Depression was fresh in the minds of most policy-makers, and they made sure not to repeat similar mistakes. With that cohort retiring, and dying, however, in the 1990s and 2000s there emerged a bunch of policy makers with absolutely no recollection of the depression (in the 1990s, most policy makers would have been born in the 1940s or later). And so they did not hedge themselves and the economy against the kind of risks that had brought America down to its knees in the 1930s.

Now, think back to a society which was far less networked than ours is, and there was little writing (“no writing” would take us too far back in time, but think of a time when it was fairly expensive to write and store written material). This meant, that there were no books, and little to understand and experience apart from what one directly experienced. For example, one would never know what a storm is if one had never directly experienced it. One wouldn’t know how to light a fire if one had never seen a fire being lit. You get the drift. Back in those days when societies were hardly networked and there wasn’t much writing, there was only one way in which one could have learnt things – by having experienced it.

I suspect that this whole concept of elders having to be unconditionally respected had its advent in one such age. Back then, the older you were, the more you had experienced (naturally!), and hence the more you knew! There was no other way in which one could accumulate knowledge or understanding. In places like India, even education didn’t help, for “education” back in those days consisted of little more than learning the scriptures by rote, and didn’t teach much in terms of real knowledge. So taking the advice of elders naturally meant taking the advice of someone who knew more. It is natural to assume that these people who knew more than the ones around were respected.

With the advent of books, and later (post Gutenburg) the advent of cheap books, all this began to change. It became possible for people to know without having experienced. It became possible for people to get more networked, and the direct impact of both of these was that it became possible to know more without having really experienced it. In this day of highly networked societies and wikipedia, it is even possible to know everything about something without even pretending to have experienced it (attend some high school seminars and you’ll know what I’m talking about). There is no connection at all now between age and how much you know.

Culture, however, doesn’t adapt itself so quickly. It didn’t help that “elders”, whose position as the “most knowledgeable” was being threatened thanks to writing and networking, were also the people in power. In any case, the real reason of respect for elders had probably been lost, so it was easier for them to extend their reign. And so it continues to extend.

Older people nowadays fail to recognize that younger people might know more than them, and get offended if the younger people tend to argue with them. Yes, experience is still a great teacher, but the correlation between experience and knowledge has long since been broken. As the pupils sang at the beginning of the Vishnuvardhan starrer Guru Shishyaru (the teacher and the pupils), “doDDavarellaa jaaNaralla, chikkavarellaa kONaralla, gurugaLu hELida maatugaLantoo endoo nijavallaa” (elders are not wise, youngsters are not buffaloes, what the teacher says is never true).

PS: As I was writing this, it struck me that this whole “respect for elders” paradigm is more prevalent in societies (such as India) where education was largely religious. Societies where education was more secular don’t seem to have this paradigm.

MBA specializations

During some casual conversation earlier this evening, I realized that I get irritated when people talk about ‘MBA finance’ or ‘MBA marketing’. I realized that I feel like not continuing the conversation when someone asks me my MBA specialization. Later I spoke to Baada about this, and he too agreed about the lack of respect for the counterparty when this topic gets mentioned.

I think it has to do with a lot of people assuming that “MBA” is just a set of courses that one does in order to become a manager. Maybe they assume that one can become a manager in a particular domain by reading a set of books. Maybe they think that an MBA is just like any other course where you get “knowledge” rather than change your way of thinking (ok a lot of people say MBA is useless and suchlike but my MBA certainly changed the way I think).

Or maybe it’s just that people find it easier to classify. Sometimes people overdo it, to the point of stereotyping. I’m reminded of my last company which worked on two kinds of products (let’s call them Product A and Product B – details are, er, classified). I started off doing a bit of A and soon I became “Associate for A”. Soon, I started doing some other stuff, which would easily fall under B. Yet, the CEO kept referring to me as “Associate for A”. It was ridiculous, but somehow he couldn’t get this classification out of his head – even when most of my time was spent doing B.

Anyways, point I’m trying to make is that people are used to classifications in education. For example, in engineering you have electrical, mechanical, etc. – all very easy. Similarly in postgrad for medicine – you can easily classify as ‘eye’, ‘bone’, etc. So isn’t it the duty of “management” also to get duly classified? And it did help the classifiers that there were three or four major areas in which most MBAs sought employment, and this made classification convenient.

Most local MBA colleges use this “specialization” funda to optimize on the number of electives that they need to offer. From a couple of interactions  with people from local MBA colleges, I found that they had very few electives – the major choice that they had was in specialization. And once you picked your specialization, your set of courses would get more or less frozen which made it easy for the college to organize.

Some local MBA colleges seem to have taken this specialization thing to ridiculous levels. The other day, one of my cousins had come to me for career gyaan and he said “I’m wondering whether to do an MBA in Aviation or an MBA in media”. I completely lost it at that point and blasted him and asked him to work before thinking of an MBA. Hopefully the current bust will take care of such ridiculousness that exists in the colleges.

Even a large number of good colleges had this “specialization” funda. I’m told that IIMC had this funda of “major” where if you took five electives in a particular area, that would go on your degree certi as a “major”. However, I’ve never heard anyone from IIMC (even from those days when this classification existed) describing themselves as a “MBA in XXX”.

Anyway, the next time you ask me what my specialization was during my MBA, you’ll make sure that I lose all respect for you.