Meritorious Students

Sir,
When school examinations (CBSE, ICSE, state boards) for class 10th and 12th and other competitive examinations (JEE, JEE advance, NEET) results are declared every year, it gives a surprise to read about the ever increasing pass percentage of students scoring very high marks. Majority of the students fall in the 9-10 CGPA scale and many of them are scoring full 100 percent.  At one hand the brilliance of students is on rise as compared to their elders but on the other hand disappointment comes when these people are not proving themselves as good students.   Getting 100 percent marks used to be exemplary feats few decades back in the country’s education system.  School, college and university toppers were generally able to score 60-70 percent marks.  With the changing education trends: whether presently students are meritorious or teachers are too good as teachers or evaluators are liberal or papers are easy and scoring, there is flow of merit in education system at any level.  For a student getting near 80 percent marks is not a good performance for his parents, society and in his own eyes.  There seems to be a competition in school boards, colleges, and universities in order to make their results more and more meritorious.  Just for comparison, people taking UPSC premier examinations like IAS, IFS, IES etc. are scoring maximum to 60 percent marks.  Students coming out of engineering colleges are not worth for employment. Students coming from colleges and universities are struggling to get very low class jobs in comparison to their educational qualifications. All this indicate that there is a big miss match in our school, college and university education system which has totally become merit oriented and not learning based.  Students having marks above 90 percent are not able to pronounce simple words, write letters/applications and to do simple mathematical operations. Wish that these meritorious students of today may prove themselves worth of their merit in their career.
Yours etc….
SS Verma,
Longowal