Graded confusion

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Graded confusion

Friday, 06 December 2019 | Shobhit Mahajan

Graded confusion

The new evaluation system of the Delhi university, which is an amalgam of absolute and relative grading systems, is bizarre and is bound to affect academic standards

Confusion (noun): The state of being bewildered or unclear in one’s mind about something. This is how the dictionary defines “confusion.” There certainly seems to be a lot of it currently in the hallowed corridors of the University of Delhi. No, “graded” does not refer to a gradual onset of bewilderment; it is about the complete lack of clarity in the evaluation of academic competence.

Recently, the University of Delhi notified new rules for evaluation. The university, which had hitherto been giving absolute marks to students, moved to a grading system. However, the rules governing the conversion of marks to grades, as decided by the university, are bizarre to say the least.

To get an idea of what the changes are, it is important to recapitulate how evaluation was previously done here. Examinations were evaluated and percentage marks were given in each subject. These marks were then moderated — a process, which contrary to the dictionary meaning of the word, essentially meant that the marks were scaled up in case the students did not do well.

This kind of moderation is something everyone is familiar with. Every year, in response to newspaper reports of a “difficult” paper, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) agrees to “moderate” the results. This leads to an inordinate number of students getting extremely high marks, in some cases they score 100 per cent marks even in subjects like History.

Massive grade inflation, which results from this innocuously named process of massaging the results, has been the norm in the Delhi University, too, for a number of years now. This form of inflation, like its economic counterpart, is obviously corrosive to the academic well-being of the university.

If this assault on academic standards was not bad enough, this year onwards, the evaluation system has undergone another change, which is truly disastrous. The University Grants Commission (UGC) had asked all universities to introduce the grading system from the 2015-16 academic session. The grading scheme ranges from Outstanding (O) to Fail (F). That by itself is not a problem if the conversion of the raw scores in the examination to the grade was either absolute (as has been the norm in many Indian universities) or if the grades are given on a relative scale where the grades only indicate the student’s position relative to the entire class (as was suggested by the UGC). This is the norm in most universities in the US as well as some institutes in the country. There is nothing inherently good or bad about either of these systems if they are followed consistently.

However, the University of Delhi, in its wisdom, has decided to come up with an amalgam of absolute and relative grading systems, thereby making a mess of what the grades mean. For instance, a student will get an “O” grade if his/her marks (they have already been scaled up/moderated) are more than the lower of 90 per cent or mean+2.5 times the standard deviation.

The 90 per cent condition obviously assumes an absolute grading scheme whereby one’s score is 90 per cent. The second condition is related to a relative grading scheme. This formula assumes that the marks obtained by a class comprising a reasonable number of students would follow what is called a bellshaped or normal distribution.

In this distribution system, one can compute the average or mean marks obtained as well the standard deviation, which is a measure of the spread around the mean. Thus, a larger standard deviation means that the marks are more spread out around the mean than in a distribution with the same mean but smaller standard deviation.

One of the properties of a normal distribution is that we can say what percentage of the population (in this case the students) would be in various regions of the marks distribution. Thus, a student whose marks are mean + 2.5 times standard deviation would have higher marks than more than 99 per cent of the students.

One can already see that this curious mixture of absolute and relative grading can lead to a strange situation. In principle, one could get an “O” grade even as he/she scores low marks. Consider a class where the mean score is 45 and standard deviation is four. Then anyone with more than 55 marks will get an “O.” Looking at the student’s grades, one would have no idea whether the “O” signifies absolute (90 per cent) or relative standing.

The impact of this at the lower end of the grades is even more disastrous. A student needs the lower of 30 per cent or (mean — standard deviation) to pass the course. Now, if the grading was purely relative, what this would mean is that about 16 per cent of the students would necessarily fail. However, the rule stipulates the lower of the two figures. Thus, if the mean and standard deviation is such that the number comes out to be more than 30 per cent, anyone with 30 per cent would pass. On the other hand, if that number comes out to be less than 30 per cent, then those marks are all that are needed to pass. Thus, 30 per cent is the maximum in any paper that would be required by a student to pass the exam.

Hitherto, the percentage required to pass any exam in the university was 40 per cent. This has now been effectively brought down to a maximum of 30 per cent. One can argue that there is nothing sacrosanct about 40 per cent and it is as arbitrary a number as any other. This may be strictly true but what is undeniable is that this would lead to a lowering of academic standards.

This change is actually more problematic than simply some numbers. A majority of the students in the sciences ultimately end up teaching in schools. What the university has effectively done is to ensure that the standard required to get a degree is lowered. The impact this would have on school teaching can only be imagined.

The University of Delhi was only recently deemed as an Institute of Eminence. The philosophy behind this controversial scheme is to endow some institutions to improve their positions in the global university rankings, which seem to have acquired a talisman-like aura with our education planners. Mandating a lowering of academic standards, as one is witnessing in higher education, is certainly an odd way to achieve that objective.

(The writer is professor of physics and astrophysics, University of Delhi)

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