GITA ADHIKARI

The conduct of the ongoing school-leaving exams gives us plenty of indication as to how our state and society functions.

On the one hand you have a curriculum not designed for critical thinking. Then you test students on their ability to cram that content and regurgitate it in an exam, the importance of which, in the life of a student, is unnecessarily and greatly exaggerated. The whole examination process is seriously flawed, it rewards those who can memorise and those who cheat. There are no marks for creativity, originality, or honesty. The exam is a sham.

Cheating in the annual test has become such an accepted part of our culture that it doesn't even raise eyebrows anymore. In fact it only makes it to the media when some novel method of cheating is uncovered somewhere. Students who get answers SMS-ed to them, fake students taking exams, or teachers and parents sitting outside the classroom filling out the answer sheets of their students. It has become so blatant, the collusion between parents, teachers and students so open, that writing about it has become dangerous.

Gorkhapatra correspondent Gita Adhikari learnt this the hard way. She was roughed up by the teacher of a school in Gulariya of Bardiya when she took this photograph this week of students cheating openly under the eyes of an invigilator. The teacher, Rishiram Sharma, demanded that she erase the picture from her camera. In Dolpa, a teacher who dared to try to stop mass cheating at an exam centre was beaten up by his fellow teachers. Irregularity in medical exams at TUTH closed down the hospital for three weeks: the most direct proof that extreme politicisation of education is now a matter of life or death.

Cheating in SLC exams is nothing new. But it has never been as widespread or accepted as it is now. There are many factors: the failure of the state, impunity, the trickle down of rampant malfeasance in government, the pandemic of impunity at every level of society, and the justification that only cheating allows the marginalised to level the playing field.

The solution to this problem is structural. As long as there is impunity in other spheres of society, rulers set the example by getting away with elastic morals. In the absence of fear of punishment in a stateless hinterland, no amount of policing will stop cheating. And there is the longer-term issue of designing our curriculum to raise the quality and relevance of education, and perfecting a test system that rewards creativity. Otherwise, we are raising Nepalis to be criminals, not critical thinkers.