Why Do Good Students Get Poor Marks

Sometime back, in one of the professor-student meetings, I raised the issue of rampant cheating during exams only to be frowned upon by my peers who let out a disinterested sigh of disgust. Surely one would expect students to support the issue of cheating? It turned out that students who perceived cheating to be a problem were in a minority. That is because the number of good students, by definition, is small.

This curious incident (which I’ll come back to) made me wonder about the modern machinery of teaching, the ethics of learning, and morality in general.

The title of this article seems paradoxical, doesn’t it? How can good students get poor marks? Aren’t they, by definition, supposed to be high scorers? Not quite. There is a difference between being good and being a good scorer. This is the crux of this article.

Two processes

One has been conditioned to believe, through societal norms, that cheating is bad. Not necessarily. It is bad for people who don’t cheat. Because it shifts the curve to the right inadvertently hurting those who are honest. There is a delicate relation between one’s grade and the “learning” itself. And I want to make a distinction between the two processes:

1. Learning process - wherein we explore the process by which one learns
2. Evaluation process - by which someone finds out how much someone has learnt

The evaluation process is a proxy to measuring the learning outcome for a student. However, the current evaluation process is outdated and incompetent to be any good. This is because students quickly learn to optimise for the evaluation process and not the learning process. What part of the syllabus is most likely to come in the exam? How much should I score in the next exam to maintain this CGPA? - these are the kind of reasoning that replaces the learning process. This is, of course, Goodhart’s Law in action.

But is it bad, you might ask. Not really. As long as students are optimising for marks and ensuring that they are learning the “most important concepts” and the evaluators are sure to give more weightage to such topics, on average, the students will have a pretty decent idea of the topic. But is this a suitable arrangement in one of the best schools in the country? How can IITians pursue excellence if all they care about is keeping their heads afloat just above the average?

To cheat or not to cheat

My plight was addressed by some of the most senior professors in my department and I felt that I had done a good thing for the long-term integrity of the learning process in IITD. Even if it made me unpopular among my peers (they are still kids), I expected the “adults” to understand the problem. They will, right?

It’s been a semester and no action has been taken by the department. Not a word or even an acknowledgement of the problem apart from the lip service in that meeting. The cheating continues.

Why was no action taken? One of the reasons might be that it is simply too hard to catch rogue students or it places an “unnecessary” burden on the department’s logistical machinery. That is true, it is cumbersome but I refuse to accept that as a valid reason for dereliction. If the department doesn’t acknowledge and address such a problem then who will?

I think the faculty’s disinterest stems from being unable to identify with the problems that students face. There are over 35 students with internships in my department in a batch of around 90. That’s less than 50%. It is hard to quantify the insecurity and uncertainty that the have-nots have to live with as they see their peers preparing to leave for their internships.

Competency ≠ CGPA

How does competency, which is what one would expect help these wunderkinds to bag an internship, relate to CGPA? Because companies treat CGPA as a good proxy for competency! A faulty proxy, yet again!²

The precedence of the CGPA being an important social indicator for competency further feeds the “utilitarian” motive behind cheating and amplifies the problem, as noted by Prof. Abhilash Jindal¹.

But why are students so strongly motivated to work in a company? Because we have been taught to regard an employee’s life as a model for a bright future. Instead of resilience and how to behave in times of crises, the constant dread of not being employed after graduation is drilled into our heads from a young age. Being jobless after graduation is seen as a laughable taboo, even a mark of being useless.³

Are the companies not aware? Surely, over a long period of time, they should be able to identify that CGPA is a bad proxy for competency and thus, seek better metrics? Yes, but there are constraints. Some of my friends in the placement cell on campus told me how there are once over 100 applications for 2 open positions in a company.⁴ Companies have to resort to automation. They can no longer individually assess each application. The process has lost the human touch. It has become more brutal, more cold like the steel edge of a knife. And I do not over-dramatise. It is routine for companies to reject students who have low CGPA.⁵

A pitiful mentality

But do 100 students really want to apply to that company or is it simply an act of desperation? It’s the latter. The fear of not getting an internship or a placement and not “sealing the deal” is so great that it tramples over common sense and undermines self-confidence. Am I to believe that the brightest kids in the country are unable to identify the intersection of their interests and skill-sets that they have to resort to “get atleast something” mentality? A pitiful mentality for an IITian, indeed!

This miserable attitude arises because these kids are not well-learned. They have simply not invested the time required to truly understand a concept, to cover their course material. They personally know that given the chance to prove their merit in a company of their choice, they will fail because all those grades that show up on their grade sheet are not a product of their merit (as it ideally should) but a product of cheating the system and feeling good about it. Thus, a merit matching process is turned into a probabilistic circus leading to unhappy students and unhappy employers as they work in a company that neither wants them nor vice-versa.

Paradise Lost?

We have examined a problem and identified three stakeholders - the student, the institute, and the employers. We have also seen the intricate dynamic that exists between these elements. How can we make it better?

The easiest way to make the situation better would be to change the metric: companies stop using GPA during recruitment. Students will stop perceiving GPA as a “valuable asset” and hence, the integrity of the learning process will be preserved!

Only that this is a utopic impossibility. Sorting a spreadsheet on the basis of CGPA might seem like an insanely attractive option when there are 500 applicants and then discarding the bottom 450.

A tongue-in-cheek solution might be to pick the students ranging from 100 to 200 on that list, they are the most sincere, honest, and truthful folks - exactly the traits that you desire in a loyal and abiding intern at your company.

Jokes aside, where are the good students? What do I mean by good? The way I define good comes dangerously close to how PG defines nerds but there are differences. This is one place where I feel my ideas parallel PG’s. Good students, at least in an IIT, are that renegade group of rag tags that are in a minority, pushed to the fringes of the social popularity contest, silently observing and experimenting and failing and trying again. The inner mind of a good student is a constant battle between utilitarianism and morality.

In the absence of forces or systems that kindle curiosity and learning, it becomes really difficult for this tiny group of curious creatures to learn. The institution needs to take steps to nurture them before they turn to other things leaving the college with a distaste for their unwelcoming experiences here.

Trivia and Personal Reflections

The idea for this post popped into my head during one of my end-semester examinations. Evidently, I didn’t have much to write on the paper (!) As I saw a line up of seniors suddenly in dire need to use the lavatory, I pondered on why I don’t start cheating just like them and start getting good grades. Why do I have such a strong moral obligation? And to whom? In whose eyes am I trying to be morally upright? Mine? Nonsense.

Further reading / Inspirations

1. This post was inspired by PG’s essay on Why nerds are unpopular.
2. Abhilash Jindal’s (Prof. Dept. of CSE, IIT Delhi) post on Why you should not cheat?

Footnotes

1: Great prof, I learnt OS from him. Soft-spoken but evidently has great ideas.

2: Then the have-nots start saying things like “I’m not good enough. Probably it’s my fault somewhere”. I get terribly upset when people underestimate themselves unconsciously because that’s lost potential for something fantastic.

3: The constant reminder of financial security as a major life goal has been drilled into their heads growing up in a household by parents who have lived their youths in the uncertainty of the tumultuous 70s and the liberalisation drama that it brought (I’m one of them).

4: In general, there has been an increase in the number of applications for every company.

5: Had some very interesting and insightful discussion on scale versus well-being with a senior IIT Delhi professor. But I’ll save that for a later post.