Solving the wrong problem

Pakistan's new grading system aims for fairness but misses deeper issues in education quality and curriculum reform.

We probably do not associate the words "breaking news" with the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training. But we live in a strange world, and five days ago, a LinkedIn post caught my attention. The Ministry of Education was indeed breaking some news. It went like this "Pakistan Introduces New Grading System for SSC and HSSC Exams". As someone who decades ago went through the SSC (matric) and HSSC (FSc) exams, and still has trauma from the anxiety of that time, the story caught my immediate attention. This breaking news was about a new grading system, introduced by the boards of examination, with the aim of promoting "fairness, transparency, and accuracy in student evaluation". So far so good - these ideas are all important. Unfortunately, it went downhill from this point onwards.

The next section of the news story was about replacing the old 7-point system (A-1, A, B, C, D, E, F) to a new 10-point system (A++, A+, A, B++, B+, B, C, D, E, U). I am still not sure what adding two plus signs, or having an alphabet soup does to address issues of fairness. One may also ask why stop at 10 point system. Why not add another set of pluses and minuses and make it a 15 or a twenty-point system? Why just stop at U - and throw in some other alphabets? One of the stated goals in the breaking news was to address the issue of grade inflation and one of the areas of impact was "increased difficulty level to pass examinations". There were numerous other aspects of the news that were quite telling. But my point here is not to take the whole news story apart (and there is rich material there to do so!) but to ask perhaps a most fundamental question: do we think this is the most pressing problem with our public education system?

In the early 1990s, in Islamabad, everyone around me went through the national exam system administered by the Federal Board. This included all of my siblings, our cousins, our neighbours and everyone else I knew. Three decades later, none of the children of these family members and friends go through the same system. People pay enormous sums of money to have their children go to private schools (of varying quality) that offer programmes of various international systems (Cambridge, IB or others).

When I ask my family and friends about the change from their time to their children's time, they talk about the erosion of quality of our schools and the lack of trust in the system. Beyond individual distrust (which has nothing to do with how many tiers of each letter grade we have), there are serious problems that manifest themselves at the societal level. We know that at the societal level, we are dealing with complex problems that require us to think broadly, analyse critically, and reflect deeply. We need to learn to co-exist with differences and recognise the value of diversity in ideas, opinions and perspectives. Our curriculum in schools is often stale and archaic. It fails to emphasise independent and critical thinking, and students have no incentive to read broadly and write routinely. Teacher training, salary and incentives to engage in the classroom are serious issues that merit immediate attention.

The national crisis in education quality has many, many dimensions but not one of them is going to be resolved by having three tiers of an A grade: A++, A+ and A.

The last part of the breaking news boldly states that "this reform aims to enhance the credibility and reliability of Pakistan's education system, providing a more accurate assessment of student performance". I also have news - perhaps not breaking, but news nonetheless - this is not reform but a needless distraction, and this would do nothing for the credibility or reliability of the country's education system.