Position Certificate

Muskan is the student of 4th semester of our department. She came to my office and complained that I have given her low marks in the very subject which I used to teach them. I showed her the break up of marks scored by her including tests, assignments and project work etc. what she told me gave me the reason to pen down these few lines. She said that she knows what she has written in the tests and how she performed in other activities and that she does not expect extra marks through rechecking; she was rather expecting sort of favour from all the teachers to add up the marks so that her aggregate percentage of the course remains higher then that of the students of the same course in all other institutions. What she was trying to say that was that the examinations taken by our institute are tough and marking is strict which leads to low percentage. As an example, she says, our topper stands at 75% while as topper of such and such institute stands at 85%. Later, few other students complained of the same problem and added that when ever any advertisement for jobs (particularly govt jobs) comes out, the only thing they take in consideration is the %age of the marks scored by the student. Institution from which an applicant has graduated is not taken in consideration. Recruiters are not aware of the examination system and the marks culture of the institute. So if our institute takes it tough and keeps the marks low, that means we are making our own students to suffer.
Being a teacher I can listen to the students But I can’t find any reason to be lenient while checking papers or give some grace marks because, first of all what students are saying may not be true, secondly, even if that is true and other institutes are keeping their marks higher, it is very complicated (if not impossible) to prove it.. Plus I am sure that the students of other institutes may be complaining the same to their teacher.
I was myself a student of an institute which was known for its tough exams and strict marking all over the country. Percentage of our topper was much less then the topper of other institutes but we never complained. The reason was that our certificate (the marks certificate) showed some statistics of the whole batch in addition to the marks obtained by a particular student. Some of that statistics include the average score of the batch, student’s position in a batch, and number of students having same position in a batch. Total number of students in a batch.
This information on the marks sheet gives any recruiter whether govt or private an insight of where the student stands in his institute and this problem of inter university competition was solved.
If the problem of students can be solved with such a simple move, why don’t all the institutions follow this and include this little piece of information to the marks sheet or make some separate certificate like “Position certificate”

Credit System

Although the reason behind the credit system is quite clear and now a days almost all the universities follow this system but I was surprised to know that there are quite a large number of academicians and authorities who don’t know the real meaning of this system, not to talk of students. There are institutions who have adopted this system and have assigned a number of credits to all the subjects they offer. But when it comes to marks, they don’t differentiate between 2 credit subject and 4 credit subject, all are treated same. These institutions use the credit information of the subject only for the time it needs for the class.
With apologizes from all those who know and have grown up with credit system, I would like to through little light on this system. Credit system has actually been designed to increase the affect of core subjects and to decrease the influence of non core subjects on aggregate %age of the semester. As an example, suppose in a certain semester of BE/BCA course, five subjects namely “operating system”, “Networking”, “Database management system”, “Environmental Science” and “English” are offered. First three subjects, being core subjects of the said course are assigned 4 credits each and environmental science and English are assigned 2 credits each. Exams are held from 100 marks in each subject. Suppose Mr. Haseeb scores 80, 80, 80, 40, 40 respectively and Mr. Vinod scores 80, 40, 40, 80, 80 respectively. Although both of them scored 320/500 (i.e. 64%) but this is not what the credit system is all about. Unfortunately some of the institutions calculate in this way which is wrong. Actually score of each subject is multiplied by the number of credits assigned to it , this way Haseeb’s overall score will be [(80* 4) + (80* 4) + (80* 4) + (40* 2) + (40 * 2)] / [(100 * 4) + (100 * 4) +(100 * 4) + (100 * 2) + (100 * 2)] which is 1120/1600 (i.e. 70 %) and Vinod’s score will be 960 / 1600 (i.e. 60 %). So the student who has performed better in his core subjects gets better results.