The sorry state of education in Bihar

An examination centre in Bihar (image source :BBC)

Mass cheating in secondary school examination in Bihar may surprise some people but for those who are from Bihar or lived in Bihar it is a routine affair. Post 1991-92 there were some improvements and mass copying reduced for a while but cheating in examination never stopped. Cheating, mass copying, question paper leaks these are very common. In fact, these have got acceptance very much like dowry practice in these areas. Most people do not see anything wrong in it.

Mass copying and cheating are in most cases happen with full cognizance of the invigilators, teachers and other officials involved in the process. During the 10th and 10th examinations in Bihar, parents are more stressed than students. They try their best to get more marks for their kids. Sometime by helping them in copying, sometime by bribing the answer sheet evaluators, and sometime by getting the question papers leaked.

This seriously ruins the reputation of many hardworking and honest Bihari students who work as hard as any other student to do well in examinations. In fact, due to mass copying and cheating going in examination, most of the evaluators assume that every one has copied and evaluate the answer sheets with this assumption. In such cases, students get less marks than what their written responses deserve. So an honest student always suffers. An honest student is considered a fool by other students and often ridiculed.

These malpractices have ensured that those who can enroll their students in CBSE and ICSE (Bihar School Examination Board conducted examinations are usually suffer more from this practice) affiliated schools do not enroll their student in Bihar School Examination Board affiliated schools. Unfortunately, CBSE and ICSE affiliated schools are mainly in district headquarters or bigger towns. So there are not many options available for good students coming out from rural areas. The result is they get poor marks in 10th and 12th examinations. A quick comparison of the percentile and percentage marks obtained by the students appearing in these three different examination systems (ICSE, CBSE and BSEB) will reveal that the top 1 percentile of BSEB students hardly score more than 80% (despite all the copying and cheating!!) of marks, while top 1 percentile of ICSE and CBSE get more than 95-98% in these examinations.

I would like to remind that these practices are in no way any indication of diligence and intelligence of these students. Most of the students who either go out for higher education or compete in other competitive examinations (where malpractices in examinations are not possible) perform at par with other state students or often outperform them.

Personally, I believe that as a society we are not devaluing honesty and integrity day by day. In some places it is more conspicuous in some it is concealed. The key factors are not absolute belief in these values but social acceptability. If something is dishonest, unethical but socially acceptable we do not see any harm in doing it.