Getting marks in exams

Scoring marks in exams

It is every student’s dream, to be appreciated in the community they live in. It may be their classroom or their home, but they all feel they deserve more respect than they are given.

Why students want to get marks? And are their desires real?

Contrary to what we may believe, students don’t always have the desire to get more marks. Not all of them out their find it fascinating to strive and score marks in exams. Their fundamental desire to have an uplifted opinion in the society they live in, along with many other social pressures put fourth, cause them to forcefully have a desire for marks. But because it was not something they truly want, they would end up losing their confidence and their gift of creativity, for the sake of overcoming the social pressures and their desire to have a high opinion in the society they live in.      

Among these kinds of students are the ones, who have no problem facing the societies desires and get more marks. Their perspective to schooling and education is quite different from the ones who face problems with our educational system. But most students don’t have any desire for getting marks, and the act of separating the ones who want to score marks and the ones who merely do it for the sake of satisfying others will prove to be quite hard as both their performances would match well.

The lazybones’ perspective

Before you have second thoughts on who I called lazybones, I recommend you to read on. There are some who involve themselves in the subject that’s being taught, and try to step forward with answers showing their enthusiasm. They gamify the act of listening to the teacher’s teachings, at times with only them and the teacher being the part of the game, and sometimes involving others into the game as well. Whoever it might be, it would be fun to be the first person approaching with a logical solution to a question put forth to the entire class.

And soon enough, there will be many others willing to join; this will then grow-up to be a colourful and interactive class for the teacher as well as for the students involved. This positive motivation that they achieved in class, would encourage them to learn the subject even further and start gamifying the act of scoring marks.  Once they do it, they are declared the winners of our educational system. Human’s response to various situation is so complicated that when talking on definite scales, it becomes invalid to even talk about average behaviour of people subjected to such situations. So though this kind of classroom motivation may be beneficial to most, it could also remain uninfluential for some.

For whoever it may be, meeting up with social suppression in the society they live, and as they start feeling that there is no way out, they get affected even further and the change becomes more irreversible as time goes on. And yeah, the average mark scorers are the lazybones!

So how does one really score more marks?

To answer this we have to head back to the fundamentals. Why do children find their play time more enjoyable than their study time? Let’s look at it deeper. What do children do while playing (let’s say they play football on the beach)? The game might have a team of approximately five, they would set two opposite spots for goalposts and approximately define the height of the goalposts. If they are lucky enough to have walls for goal posts, they might even have a mark for the height.  

So each team plans, coordinates, respect their team members while playing, put in all their efforts, and strive to their maximum extant to score goals. They invest more effort and mind work, which no subject they study at school will require. This seems odd isn’t it? If they spend half their efforts they spend in games they play, for studying, they may even top the class. But they won’t. For two reasons, one being that they don’t play football under real-time unhealthy pressure, and other, they don’t have to fear or answer to anyone no matter what the outcome of the game is (internal conflicts among children are common to arise and can be neglected).

So, why can’t students treat scoring marks like a game? This is exactly what healthy top scorers do. They gamify they act of scoring marks and gaining good reputation from teachers and parents. For them, marks are like football scores. So if you really want to score more marks and top the class, start looking at the subjects like a game. Each time you score less marks, you must realize that you are scoring less goals (or runs in case of cricket).

The act of striving for victory is the key point to becoming a topper. Average scorers on the other hand, won’t have a reckless mentality to win. They stay satisfied when they had studied enough and won’t go further. If you are a professional spots person, let me put it in a way you would understand. At class, the toppers are professionals and the ones who don’t score much are the amateurs who play the sport called “schooling”, just for the sake of playing (fine, there is one change; amateurs in sports play for fun but in classrooms, students play the “game of schooling” under pressure).

Is the interest for the subject alone enough for someone to score more marks?

For people who have specialized interests in specific areas, just doing your subject well and understanding it much better than others is not going get you the marks you deserve. Again, exams don’t want you to know the subject well; all they want of you is answer the questions they ask, however offbeat or meaningless it may be to the real side of your subject. If you are such a person, you must learn to treat exams and school works as something different from your real talents in your subject; even if you don’t eventually you will. Because there will come a time when a person who knows less in the same subject scores more than you. Fundamentally, to score marks, you need to treat the exam hall like a game field.       

copyright © 2016 K Sreram, all rights reserved.