What Will The Lec Test This Time Around?
On the fear of failure and seeking the wrong goal
I doubt there is a department more diabolical in the University of Nairobi’s medical school than the Department of Microbiology.
In our fifth year, another department almost claimed the throne, but it does not quite match the lengths to which the Department of Microbiology goes to see its students suffer.
I had a brief shock with the unit in my second year, when I was doing less studying and more working, but that is a story for another day.
In our third year, we thought the department was inspired by the everlasting comforter, the Holy Spirit. One of the lecturers shared with the class representative that he would spend that week’s afternoon lecture teaching us how to answer questions the way the department preferred.
By this time in medical school, we understood that lecturers and high school teachers didn’t care so much if you had the content. They were more interested in your answering technique, a sad metric for gauging the smart from the keenly smart. You could export word for word from the lecture slides but still not get anything close to half the full marks of the question. And according to the afternoon plan made by this particular lecturer, we were the problem.
We swallowed our pride — it was a better gamble to understand our errors than the alternative — and attended class that afternoon. I think everybody was present. Afternoon classes would typically substitute for opportunities to run your errands or catch up on sleep, but this one was packed. You would wonder what top brains would not have figured out about a department’s persnickety demands.
It didn’t last long. He insisted we break our answers into points. Creating space between the points was essential. Each sentence should be packed with a strong answer. Pretty simple.
This was how I used to answer my questions in my second year, but barely got the marks I anticipated. This time around, it seemed like the lecturers were on a mission to save their pen’s ink, rushing to give you a 2/8 and submit the papers. Another person who wrote the same exact points but in paragraph form got 6/8. Maybe they were the first lucky ones to get the lecturer with a fully loaded pen. Maybe I wasn’t the problem. Then again, the student is always the problem. That must be the case. It has to be.
Anyway, we got the gist and waited for the continuous assessment test. It came, we easily breezed through it and submitted it in good time. Weeks later, when they released the results, we were even more puzzled than before attending that afternoon lecture.
Lifting points straight from the lecturer’s notes was not enough. Sticking to the taught format barely scratched the surface of their requirements. No. They did that to make their marking easy. That was my conclusion. We reaped our 2/8s with the occasional 5/8 to lift our heads out of the torrential wave of failure.
But get this: the ones who structured their answers in the complete opposite way got most of the marks. Their points were no different from ours. It was only the structure. Mojo Jojo and Him would have loved such cruelty.
This is the sad eventuality of our education system. It’s not that the students aren’t smart, it’s that the lecturers are forced to find a way to create the normal curve. That leaves students wondering not whether they know the answers, but if they will answer it to the lecturer’s satisfaction.
Thus, you have top brains asking the wrong questions. To survive in this academic jungle, the ‘right’ question is:
What will the Lec set this time around?
High School
I represent intelligent niggas that grew up harshly
— J. Cole
This secret was revealed to me by my brother when I was in high school and validated by my history teacher when I was in my final year, form 4. He told me:
Nobody is interested in how smart you are. They are interested in how well you answer the question.
It’s the sad truth.
I began piecing together the clues the moment he revealed this truism. For instance, in biology, if they pointed at an organelle, say the sausage-shaped one with internal cristae-like structures, the correct answer was not mitochondria. It was mitochondrion.
While the young are fascinated by the occasional finding, the elderly notice patterns. This was what my brother told me.
So those who pass exams highly at the high school level are not necessarily extremely smart. Medical school, for instance, is dense with top achievers — the top one hundred students. Many, however, struggle with the course. In truth, medical school humbles you. But it is also a filter for those who can take the hits it gives and those who cave under its tough demands. It also tells you in as short a time as possible if it’s a course you would want to continue pursuing.
But as I have shared the anecdote about our third-year experience, medical school is just another filter. The first one was in high school. Each has the same undertones and demands.
Granted, life tends to throw curve balls. Our job is to figure things out as fast as we can. This is one argument. So maybe those who make it to the final stretch have found ways of ‘satisfying the board of examiners’.
However, it also means that students spend years only focusing on the technique of answering questions rather than the adventure a question can open one to. Higher learning is not about finding the best way to satisfy an examiner. It should be a means of pealing the mask of a subject or domain and discovering its hidden layers of truth.
The students, on the other hand, chase the topics that will be asked and make sure they know how best to answer them. Better yet, why not go through the previous year’s papers? If they are interested in how students answer they might as well repeat the questions if it filtered enough people from proceeding to the next level.
And that’s what the lecturers and students do: students study past papers and lecturers repeat the same or similar questions.
These top students would want to know which topics the lecturers set just as final-year high school students would want to know which topics will come in the nationwide examinations.
During that weekend, before we began the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), some of my classmates confidently approached me:
Inno, this time, tutakushow dust. Hii kitu tumeilock.
They were confident that they knew the topics which would be set and apparently, had the ‘leaked’ papers. They knew friends from Alliance who shared the papers with them. To which I smiled and gave them a thumbs-up. As long as we all passed, I was happy.
The effect of wanting to know what topics would be set in an exam has this effect on students. It gives you confidence that you will pass. There goes the other metric — everybody wants to pass.
Passing, not knowing. Nobody cares what you know. They only want to know if you passed. Your papers will show it. So my classmates and friends were confident that they would pass. They weren’t confident about their knowledge.
This became evident in the first paper — Biology practical. That Monday, at the assembly ground, few Form 4 students paid heed to what the teachers said. They were busy going through all the bones they thought could be set. Someone had ‘leaked’ the idea that bones would feature in the paper.
The moment I heard that I was happy. I loved bones. I was confident.
Before the exams started, those of us seated at the front were to hint what the practical would be about once we were given the papers. If it was bones, we would show how relaxed we were or with smiles. If it wasn’t, we were tasked with hitting the wall. In short:
Imegonga mwamba.
To mean it literally hit the wall.
Guys, it hit the wall.
Not a single question was asked about bones.
However, it was the easiest biological practical I had ever sat for. I walked out smiling. Most left the room devastated. It took them a while to reorient themselves for the next exam. That’s what the educational system has turned students into — bright minds interested in topics being set and then finessing your answering technique to suit the marker.
The same fate befell the listeners of the whispers about Kiswahili.
That year, many students got A’s, but not straight A’s because of these two subjects — Kiswahili and Biology.
It’s not that they are not good in these subjects, but that they narrowly prepare for topics they anticipate. When they aren’t set, their brains experience the physical equivalent of an earthquake. And remember, earthquakes have aftershakes. So it takes a while to readjust.
Students are not incentivized to learn for the sake of learning. They are incentivized to pass. Your paper is your face everywhere you go. You better save face.
Others use underhand means to secure their grades. If a paper speaks on your behalf, you can fabricate it, or pay the top officials to ensure you have a clean record.
Seeking the wrong goal
In systems dynamics, what I have just explained is a system archetype.
Archetypes are problematic patterns of behaviours of systems. It does not help to know them. Putting up with them doesn’t help. You have to get rid of them.
For instance, if the goal is to raise a country’s GDP, the components of a system will orient to raise the GDP. Taxes will rise, houses and land become expensive, and education will remain a product of the elite. Someone who buys a mansion or pays insane rent is better than the project manager intent on creating clean, affordable spaces for people to live in.
But no, we want to raise the GDP. So we have to find ways to increase it.
Usually, the goal is something that can be measured, like the GDP.
For schools, it's grades. So students will strive to get good grades. It should not then come as a surprise that some students will cheat. They are incentivized to pass.
Several schools will pay top dollar to get the exams before they are dispatched to schools. The leaders of the schools are incentivized to pass. The goal is to pass. Not to learn.
It can be a harsh reality for individuals who hunger to learn. Worse still, this becomes pounded into brains for so long that once they hit the real world, they discover that they are out of one game and into another, where grades don’t matter.
Soon, parents begin to ask their children how X or Y fared in the exam because that is the only metric that matters. You could have passed, but their interest is in how one faired compared to the biggest competitor to their child.
It can be a harsh world to live in. J. Cole sums it up in his song:
I represent intelligent niggas who grew up harshly.
He’s an example of a successful artist who learned to play the game but broke away from it. Many became swallowed by it and haven’t found ways out.
Educational institutions then become slave-making process points, kill the creative spark, and release smart compliant products. Not disruptive geniuses. The genius is killed through education as kids, parents, teachers, and schools become incentivized to follow the wrong goal.
Yet, after reading this, someone will still ask one of their classmates:
What will the Lec set this time around?
Compliance is prized over disruption.
What I’m trying to say is…
My history teacher responded to my suggestion by saying that my contribution would be more appreciated on college campuses but not in high school. This was while we were revising our answers after a test we had done.
He knew.
Learning was a good thing. But passing was better.
How to break the systemic archetype becomes an important question.
Picture a world where we got awarded from campus for the problems we solved rather than the number of publications or grades we scored. Wouldn’t we be incentivized to solve quality problems en masse?
What I’ve done over the years is cultivate my interest while satisfying the needed institutionalized incentives. It takes bravery. But most of those who succeed in achieving these incentives fear failure to the point that it cripples their leap — the leap of faith in oneself.
But if you’re able to beat such a system, you definitely can beat the one where you’re genuinely interested. It nurtures the kind of confidence you can amass enough to challenge the greats, as I have done previously.
And you only need to preserve the surface-level curiousity.
That alone is enough.
Curiousity, this mysterious force we can never explain, will do the rest.
Don’t make that lecturer let that spark die.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube