Meribeni Kikon
Nutun Basti
Some teachers are stringent while some generous in allocation of marks to examinees. There may even be occasions when an otherwise generous teacher may have got out of the wrong side of bed and in a foul mood may not have been as generous in his markings on that particular day.
Looking at past HSLC results and the toppers in particular, the difference in percentage from top 1 down to 20 in sequence varies from each other in fractions. How is one to judge in what way top 1 is superior to top 20 when it is evident to all that a single teacher may not have necessarily evaluated the scripts all the toppers? Similarly, how about the rest of the students who may have missed the recognition of being in the top 20 by a fraction? How is one to know if the examiners have done justice to their scripts? Again, chances are that the scripts of such students may have been evaluated by a less than generous examiner than the examiner who evaluated the lucky 20? The hypothetical deductions can be endless.
The point I want to make here is that, the probability of many deserving students missing the accolade and recognition of being in the top 20 could be due to a variety of the reasons as argued above. It stands to reason that, by the very fact that such unfortunate students, though having done extremely well, may missed the rarefied top 20 position by a fraction of percentage by a combination of bad luck. Nonetheless, they are equally intelligent, consistent and hardworking throughout and it is only fair that due recognition should be meted out to them in equal measure. These can be done by the NBSE reverting back to the past practice of acknowledging the best 50 students from this coming HSLC result. This will harm no one but only encourage and boost the morale of many hard working students. I trust that many parents will agree with my reasoning which I believe is valid because, we are talking about top 50 out of close to thirty thousand candidates and not out of a couple of hundreds.
Being a teacher for more than three decades and in the process scrutinizing and chief examining hundreds of scripts year after year gives me the authority to reflect with some degree of verity on this issue.
