Once again an education mess-up

January 15, 2012, 7:21 pm , The Island


By Sumanasiri Liyanage

The committee appointed by the President to look into the GCE Advanced Level results fiasco handed over its report to the President last week. As the main ‘findings’ of the report show, the committee has almost totally reaffirmed what the two ministers and the officials of the department of examinations said prior to the appointment of the committee. More precisely, as the Ministers and officials informed the public at the very beginning, the committee after painful investigation has said that a mistake had happened only at the eleventh hour in relation to district rankings and all the other aspects were perfect. Of course, it has made many suggestions to improve the physical infrastructure of the department of examination and its human capital. It has also suggested that the University Grants Commission should seek expert advice. Ironically, the committee itself in its investigation has refused to seek such expert advice on the issue of Z-score formula wittingly or unwittingly accepting the premise that the formula was totally legitimate. The findings of the committee have once again raised the issue: Do these committees of inquiry perform any positive function?

Any outsider by looking at the composition of the committee would argue that this was an excellent committee to investigate the matter in hand. A former secretary to the Ministry of Justice was the chairperson of the committee. Others indicated Vice-Chancellors of four universities and a Principal of a leading school in the country. What else could we expect? Nonetheless, the way in which the committee had performed its task raised many issues including the integrity of its members. Last Friday, Prof R O Thatil of the Faculty of Agriculture wrote an excellent article in The Island with strong arguments and hypothetical figures deriving from two sets of Z-score formulae. If Prof. Thatil is correct, I strongly believe he is, one has to conclude that the committee of inquiry wasted its time just beating about the bush. Suppose there have been no mistakes in marking scripts or entering marks on spreadsheet or programming the Z-score authorised by the UGC. It is appropriate to note that in case of mistakes in marking answer scripts and entering marks, there has been a long-tested mechanism in the Department of Examination that ensures their rectification in the process of re-scrutinising. The issue relating to this year’s results is not a mistake of that sort. According to Prof. Thatil, the issue is more fundamental, namely, the very formula used in calculating the Z-score is inaccurate. Ranking, district or national, depends on the Z-score. Moreover, it is the Z-score that would be taken into account in deciding on the university admission.

Any committee of inquiry that has an iota of seriousness would have begun its work with the suspicion that something might have gone wrong with the Z-score formula because of the differences between the two syllabi at the last year GCE A/L Examination. The public in this country have every right to ask the members of the committee one simple question: Did you guys check whether the Z-score formula was correct? The committee had no right to take it for granted that the formula already adopted was correct when there were reasonable case for suspicion. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, a very reasonable and responsible leader of one of the teachers unions, Joseph Stalin, informed that "district ranks and countrywide ranks of the students of most districts could not be accepted as they were contradictory". He gave a clear example and informing us that "the district ranks of two students who had obtained B, B and C in the same subjects were 369 and 144. Their country ranks were 4,113 and 4,649. The district ranks of two other students with B, C and C in the same subjects were 278 and 405" (The Island, December 27, 2011). One of the drawbacks of the committee was its composition as it did not have a member with special knowledge or training in statistics. However, that drawback would have been easily remedied had the committee decided to consult a trained statistician as a first step in starting its work. Ironically, the committee has not consulted a specialist in statistics in spite of the fact that many statisticians were available in the university system of this country. So in my opinion this was the first mistake of the committee. If the committee thought that such an inquiry into this fundamental issue would be embarrassing to the respective ministers and the ministry high ranking officials so that such exercise should be avoided, one has to conclude that the committee has completely neglected the mandate given to them by the President.

In a previous article, I wrote that ‘a serious surgery is needed to correct the situation, to avoid its recurrence and to remove the deep rooted mistrust in the system. The surgery should be invariably preceded by a correct diagnosis.’ Now, it seems the doctors who were asked to diagnose the problem have miserably failed. This is the committee of inquiry I suggested in my previous article. ‘What are the immediate corrective measures that can be taken up? I submit that an impartial and independent review committee should be appointed to look into the entire procedure of preparation of results. The nominees or representatives from the Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA), Ceylon Teachers Union and the Inter-University Student Federation should be included. The committee should also include experts on statistics and computer programming who have the knowledge and capacity to revisit Z score formula, and the way in which it was programmed. Most importantly, the officials who are at present working in the Department of Education and the UGC should not be included in the committee. The findings of the committee should be made available to the public in all three languages. I believe that this submission would be more fruitful than the idea expressed at the press conference of the Ministry of Higher Education on Tuesday. At the press conference it was claimed that individual candidates would be allowed to get their results reviewed. This will be not only a messy idea but also it would place candidates in a difficult situation.’ Had the government acted in this manner, it would have resolved the issue by now. Unfortunately, they messed up it once again.

There were three issues that led to unrest in the university system. They are, (1) GCE A/L result mess up; (2) the proposal for the setting up of private universities; and (3) salary anomaly in the University system that involve academic and non-academic staff. Now the government has informed that it does not intend to bring a bill to set up non-state universities. The UGC has recently issued a circular correcting to reasonable extent salary anomalies of the university staff. The problem with this government is not that it does not listen to people. It does. We have seen it on the issue of private sector pension scheme and the setting up of private universities. The problem with this government is it takes decision only in response to power (that is positive) and not anticipating ex ante the repercussions of the action of the government (that is negative). I would attribute this flaw for the absence of clear perspective.



The writer teaches political economy at the University of Peradeniya.

E-mail: sumane_l@yahoo.com