There is nothing spectacular about students who have studied in regional languages who do well at the SSC examinations. Please factor in the fact that corrections done at the Goa Board are slanted towards being populist. The moderators of papers are hard wired to seeing that as many students as possible pass.
There is a certain band of marks below passing marks of which papers the moderators are obliged to pass. Suppose this mark is x then all papers in the range passing mark minus x are rechecked and the papers are necessarily 'brought up' to pass marks. Then spelling and grammar are totally ignored as long as the broad meaning of an answer is more or less correct, if the answer is marked wrong, the moderator will force all examiners to give 'some marks' to the student. Teachers who have no idea at all of the subject are sometimes made examiners. There are cases of teachers who have no idea of the nuances of the English language correcting English papers who mark brilliant answers by students who are good in English as wrong because they are not word for word in conformity to the model answers. Thus bright students get penalized. Again standards of evaluation differ from the past. In the past, it was difficult to achieve marks above a certain level as the papers were judged according to certain standards, Thus a language student who got say 60 percent was adjudged to be 'good'. Today it is not unusual for students get almost cent percent marks. Dr. Gomes has written a largish essay on how her offspring was educated in Konkani at the primary stage did remarkably well later on in the Herald yesterday. Excellent. Children of educated parents who take an interest in their childrens' studies will always, as a rule, do well. She further goes on to wonder why there are no mass failures in std V. Well I could educate Dr. Gomes on the reason why in spite of the difficulties of the change in medium of instruction there are no mass failures. Schools are obliged to promote these children from std v to std vi for the simple reason that aided schools must survive or face mass retrenchment and closure of divisions. There is a minimum number of students per division per class. If the number of students falls below this number, the division has to be closed. There is a correlation between the number of divisions in a school and the staff strength and the staffing pattern. No school wants to lose a division and so precautions are taken to avoid such a probability by adequate promotions sometimes even though the pupils may be unworthy of promotion - what some heads like to call the cannon fodder for the next year privately. Schools resort to all sorts of tactics to prevent closure of divisions to the extent of enrolling 'dummy students'. Dummies are students who have left the school but not taken the leaving certificate. This is why the local ADEIs are obliged to do a physical verification of the number of students present in a school on a given day. Promotion of students from primary schools who face change of medium is effected artfully to prevent closure of divisions by sometimes inflating marks or resorting to means which are not really in the puritanical sense acceptable. A random check of what is being taught in the class vis a vis the syllabus will tell tales. These things are not talked about openly. -- Tony de Sa. tonydesa at gmail dot com ^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v