The Greatest Paradox in Academia!
There is a distinct, quiet joy in receiving a phone call from a former student who has just landed on their own feet.
Well, this past week, I had the privilege of receiving not just one, but three such calls. Three different students had reached out to share the good news that they had been placed in highly reputed institutions.
Naturally, as their professors, hearing that our students are stepping confidently into the next chapter of their lives is immensely gratifying for us!
But wait! it wasn’t just the fact that they got the jobs - that made me happy; it was one common thread of thought that echoed through all three conversations.
Almost verbatim, each of them said some variation of this: “Sir, they didn’t even ask us for our Degree certificates or for our CGPA scores. They just asked us about the skills that we had honed thus far, that we can bring to their institution.”
For years, we watch students sit in lecture halls and examination rooms, gripped by the anxiety of securing the highest possible marks. We see the frantic anxieties writ large in their faces, the stress over missing out on half a mark, 😊 and the deeply ingrained belief that a transcript is the ultimate measure of their worth!
However, the professional world out there is operating on a different rubric nay metric, entirely!
Institutions and employers are no longer looking for your mark statements! Or your huge haul of degrees! They are eagerly looking out for your skills!
And this I guess is the most puzzling paradox in all of academia!
Students focus all their time and energy in writing their examinations, while they are hesitant to devote even a fraction of that time to hone their skills!
It would be sagacious to know that, an examination is just a ‘Performance’ while Skill Development is a ‘Process’.
Examinations offer immediate, tangible validation. They provide a clear quantifiable score! However, skill development, is not a performance. it is a process! Sometimes the process is quite frustrating, and entirely devoid of instant gratification. Cultivating a lasting skill also requires patience and consistency!
This disparity between performance and process results in a disconnect which ultimately highlights a challenge in our modern pedagogical landscape!
We have inadvertently trained students to ‘sprint’ for the test rather than train them to face the ‘marathon’ of consistent skill development!
Personally, I feel that, the skills students actually need to cultivate cannot be evaluated by a continuous internal assessment test at all!
The goal, then, is to bridge this gap.
And this requires a paradigm shift in narrative!
This can happen only when we teach our students to move the focus away from just chasing the marks! When the college becomes a living laboratory for developing lifelong competencies!
We need to help our students realise that the most profound victories aren’t found in the frantic scribbling of an exam answer, but in the quiet, uncelebrated moments where a difficult skill finally begins to be cultivated or mastered!
In this regard, I am so happy to note that, many of our students are taking their time out to find the right internships, volunteering projects, or hone their writing skills, interviewing skills, music skills, designing skills, singing skills, interacting skills, reading skills, speaking skills, etc., and more!
As eminent critic Scupin Richard rightly points out,
Marks are for the moment! Skills are what you carry with you out into the world!
Happy Skilling!
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