Exams in Tamil Nadu

Holidays…That time of the year when you have just nothing to do…nothing at all…that too after my hectic quarter, I am just bored. You know that, right? When you have been busy and all of a sudden you have nothing to do. Your mind keeps thinking what it should do, but keep returning a blank. I am in that state now.

Since I was trying to kill time, I was reading a Tamil newspaper online, and came upon this story. Basically the story says that students in their final year of school are very afraid about their future. Why? Because the questions in the final exam were “tough”. By tough, they mean that the questions did not come from the book or were not direct.

Isn’t that bull shit? Yeah I know. That’s the state of education in Tamil Nadu. Students expect the questions to be direct or just the same examples from their text book. The education system has trained them so bad that they can’t even think and apply the techniques they were taught. All the system teaches them is to memorize the questions and examples in the book and write the answers in the exam. Now that some sensible person has set a question paper that would test how much the students can think people are afraid about the student’s future. I am ashamed myself because I studied in that system. I really am afraid about the future of my country with such students becoming engineers and doctors. Why can’t people at least now realize that memorizing is not going to help anyone, but understanding the basics is the way to go. It is really a shame that sometimes even exams in engineering were like that. I don’t know how long this would go.