Rose by another name is a shabby shrub

It seems that HRD Ministry in India is hell bent on granting Obama’s wish that US education system should better that of India’s.  It can be achieved in two ways.  Either upgrade, fine tune and tweak the US education system.  Or else downsize, skrew up and demolish the India's education system.

Since Kapil Sibal cannot finger around with US system, he is in full cry to demolish and demote the Indian system.

First he scrapped the common board exams for 10th standard – because it puts the students under unnecessary competitive traumatic pressure.  (there goes my grammar – in keeping with the Minister’s wish).

But isn’t such exams at early stages the reason why our students are doing better later in higher education ? I really don’t know what happened, but some bulbs seems to have suddenly brightened up. 

Since Kapil Sibal cannot retract his position without losing face, the CBSE reintroduces the exams, but with a different name - Proficiency Test System (PTS).

Even worse, the question papers for these tests would not be set by the 10th standard teachers, but by Nuke scientists and Research professors (who are definitely not educationists).  The only good thing is that the PTS is optional and not mandatory; but I assume that within a few years, when people realise the fact that questions are set such eminent people, it would become another prestigious exam to score (& show off).

Pray tell me, how will replacing a test designed by educationists for 15 year olds with a test designed by Researchers and Scientists make it less traumatic ?  I think the Ministry has a trauma – a head trauma at that.
:-S

They already created a mess by replacing marks in exams with grades and no one is sure of what is what.  To add to the whole confusion, I am not exactly clear about this whole concept.  I can understand if one can assess the grades of a student directly. But to grade the students, first there have to be marks and grading is going to be based on marks obtained.  I have this simple question – to simplify a system, do you add more steps ?  Sounds like some Zen mindfuk.

In all this fiasco, I only thank God that Bureaucratic Bungler Manmohan Singh had not made Kapil Sibal as Minister for Sports.  Imagine the havoc he would have caused by scrapping runs/goals/points and awarding results by percentiles !?!

A 14 year old Tendulkar and 16 year old Kambli batting for a world record under such circumstances would probably have a ‘percentile’ of 91 and 95 respectively.  (I can’t find the actual scorecard – only that Tendulkar scored 326* and Kambli 349*).

Here is working :-

sl.	Player Names	Player Scores
1	player 1	10
2	player 2	15
3	player 3	20
4	player 4	25
5	player 5	30
6	player 6	35
7	player 7	40
8	player 8	45
9	player 9	50
10	player 10	55
11	player 11	60
12	player 12	65
13	player 13	70
14	player 14	75
15	player 15	80
16	player 16	85
17	player 17	90
18	player 18	95
19	player 19	100
20	player 20	105
21	t'kar	326
22	kambli	349
	Percentile =	Lesser no. Scores / Total no. Scores *100
	T'kar	which will be 20/22*100 ROUNDED
		91
		(formula used is =ROUND(20/22*100,0))
	Percentile =	Lesser no. Scores / Total no. Scores *100
	Kambli	which will be 21/22*100 ROUNDED
		95
		(formula used is =ROUND(21/22*100,0))

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