Testing Times

My grandfather taught me geography in school. He was very knowledgeable and taught the students with great passion. His class would resemble a theatre where you would see the students and the teacher walking up and down the classroom. While it was fun to be in his class, we developed cold feet and trembled in fear while answering his question paper. He always believed in a student writing an essay for four hundred to five hundred words. His questions set the student’s thinking and help him express in his own words.

I belong to the ‘rote’ learning generation, and I learnt the content by repetition, either talking around or writing repeatedly. We had to rewrite the correct word or answer at least ten times for any mistake we made in our written prose. Memory was the king, the more I crammed, the better student I was.

We faced challenges while answering the geography questions of my grandfather. Two samples for your reference:

1. You are travelling on a train from Mangalore to Madras. State the names of the states you cross, the temperature zones and the different crops in these zones. Your essay should include the lifestyle of the farmers in these states.
2. Per the legend, his Holiness Shankaracharya walked from Kerala in the South to Badrinath in the North. Assuming you are a Shankaracharya, give five temple architectures you would see and explain three salient features of these architectures.

I leave it to the imagination for the quality of answers from the students. The train journey from Mangalore to Madras wasn’t just about stating facts. It was a journey through landscapes, meeting farmers, feeling the temperature change, and understanding the lives interwoven with the land. 🚂

To be him was to see temples in their grandeur, touch their pillars and know their stories. Can you imagine it? — feeling the roughness of the stone and the mysteries they held! 🛕

I read the book — Knowing what we know by Simon Winchester recently. The author detailed the Gaokao test (( National Higher Education entrance examination), a life-changing event for Chinese kids in their teens. Preparations would start a few years earlier, and the Chinese kids go through a gruelling experience. In India, we have a similar test called JEE ( Joint Entrance Examination) for admission into IITs — premier engineering institutions. The JEE is relatively easy compared with Gaoko.📚📖📝

I give a sample of the questions for a Gaoko test in Winchester’s book.

1. Write an essay on how Thomas Edison would react to a mobile phone if he visited the 21st century.
2. Write a letter to an 18-year-old girl in 2035.
3. The milk containers are always square boxes, containers of mineral water are always round bottles, and round wine bottles are delivered in square boxes. Write an essay on the subtle philosophy of the round and the square.

The above questions are similar to my grandfather’s, except the Gaoko questions also test the students’ creative skills. Multiple answers are possible, but the examiners are looking for specific responses. 😕

My grandfather wanted us to explore; Gaokao wanted students to imagine! 🎨

As an experiment, I took the help of ChatGPT for answers, and I got the following response when I input the above questions:

I’m sorry, but the information you’ve provided online doesn’t contain sufficient content for me to address your question or fulfil your instruction. Please provide more context, information, or specific details about Thomas Edison and his life. I would be happy to help you. 😜