The word corruption and bias are heard throughout the day be it in informal discussions among colleagues at work or in TV debates. The words are repeated over and over again and many people are of the belief that those in power are not doing the things in the right way. The real tragedy is that everyone has a notion of what constitutes the right way.
Any human being in contact with other humans, ie., being part of society has his/her own preferences and this is inevitable. Having preferences will have a spillover effect in our actions and it is here that when giving judgements or evaluations people see some bias while those delivering don't see. If the difference in the expectations and the delivered results are huge then there can a unrest.
An example of this unrest can turnout into a gigantic monster like civil wars that we are witnessing in the Arab countries. Some of this wars are genuine while many of the civil wars are spread of the developed countries to sell their products and set-up puppet governments and have a reliable markets for their high priced goods and services.
Looking at the results the bias can generate it is in the better interests of the society that where possible the bias should be eliminated. In the field of education such bias can influence the marks allotted to the students in the examinations. To minimize this bias, the main examination evaluations are done together with a teacher getting to evaluate not his students.
The secrecy of the student even though maintained, the evaluators have formed cartels to give everyone good marks and thus the true capacity of the student is getting hidden in the scheme of things. To eliminate any kind of bias, the evaluation should be done by machines and one way to do this is by having objective type questions to numerical and objective type of questions.
With only 4 answers, the students can arrive at answers by the method of eliminations of worst answers and without having good grasp of the subject, it is possible to score marks. If all the questions are marked with the same letter, then by probability theory there is a chance of getting 25% marks. To reduce this mischief and incorrect ways of getting marks there should be atleast 8 solutions and each with slight variations so as to ensure that the elimination method of answering will fail.
Apart from this, the students should be given instructions to fix the calculators to a certain fixed decimals and the same number of decimals that are rounded off by the calculators should be used in the calculations. With such a condition if for a question the correct answer is 11.49 then the student should be provided with a choice of {11.19, 11.49, 11.69, 12.19, 12.49, 12.69, 13.49, 13.69, ...}. This will ensure that the student has to calculate the answers by himself. But now the choices given to the students will be {11.49, 111.49, 0.1149, 1.149}.
Giving many choices and making the student to really calculate accurately should be the goal. For the non numerical type of questions where possible multiple answers should be given and the student should identify both the answers to getting the marks. Negative marking should be full deduction instead of partial deductions which makes the student to not take risk and go for answering questioning when he doesnot know the answer or the topic fully.
The students will always try to overcome the exam scheme with short-cuts and thumb rules but as the valuators the scheme of the exam should be continuously upgraded and new ways and means should be created to identity the best from the group. The bubble marking sheets which the students could then be evaluated by the computer to remove the bias, or else on-line tests can be conducted where the results can obtained instantaneously and the eliminated the bias. With more choice in the solutions the student should be made to work the problems to answer.
If on-line tests are conducted each student could be provided a unique set of numbers for a given numerical problem and students could be asked to enter the results achieved by calculation which can be evaluated for correctness. The bubble sheets could be modified to look similar to having 8 shaped spaced regions to darken the appropriate digits(as in calculators) to mark the answer in the required units.
In any system there will be rules made by those who are in power and there is always a struggle by those who are kept under the rules. One group try to bypass the rules while the other comes up with tougher rules. But in education the later group and some of them have joined the former to bypass the rules and the evaluations have become skewed and the results are not becoming indicative of the subject knowledge of the students.
There is a urgent need of changing the system of evaluations and implement unbiased evaluations.
