I remember this episode from high school. Like most schools that train you to excel in the exams by scoring the highest marks, my school too had a system of testing that encouraged you to know the contents of your textbooks verbatim. Though the textbook committee, in creating the book, incorporated an exercise at the end of each chapter meant to measure the pupils' learning, my teachers would devise a question paper that needed you to know much more than the answers to the exercise queries. They would ask us, for example, when the apple bonked Newton and rang a bell in his head, leaving alone what was revealed to him. The latter, after all, was routine fare. The History test, in the meanwhile, would ask us if we knew the date on which the First World War began, ignoring the causal circumstances that had accumulated over many years. We would all know the story, but the toppers would know the timeline. Yet, this system had a flaw. The tests would not only have such questions but also ones requiring long-winding answers. The topper would also have to be among the fastest scribes, whilst not sacrificing the charm of well-groomed letters. But, in writing these paragraphs, we could combine facts from memory with figments of the imagination. Thus, we could still get part marks and evade failing the test. One Social Science teacher set out to remedy this.
She agreed writing neatly and quickly was important, and so gave her pupils lengthy homework assignments. Her tests, though, were revolutionary. The 25-mark exercise would have only 25 fill-in-the-blanks questions. And to fill the blanks, you would need to know every word in every chapter of the textbook. The one word for a test that racked your memory for 25 particular words from among the couple of thousands you had tried to memorize the previous night? Nightmare. It is a similar strategy that informed the true/false and yes/no sections of tests. A question requiring the briefest response of a single word, thus, was the hardest.
Getting into college was a relief as we neither had to be as concise or precise.
Some time ago, though, I encountered this paradigm of questioning again. This time on live TV. Thankfully, I was only a spectator. Among my favorite TV shows is Karan Thapar's Devil's Advocate, and as he slashes his way through the heath and haze his guests conjure up in response to his well-researched questions, he tends to paraphrase them and seek from them an assent for his summary of their words. He asks them for a mere yes/no answer. He uses the same technique to weed out factual hyperbole and statistical subterfuge. His guests, mostly politicians and policy makers who are among the most eloquent orators in the country, usually digress in their reply, floundering from the pointed broadside. Answers roll off their tongues effortlessly when they can respond with a stream of words that has many qualifiers that hedge them against scrutiny. The one word test is a nightmare.
Even more recently, I have had a closer brush with this formidable form of querying. A horoscope that is an amalgamated rent agreement with the various celestial bodies, detailing their occupancy of the different sectors in the chart, a photograph, a flimsy bio-data that focuses more on the family, and a few awkward meetings are supposed to inform me adequately and enable me to accept or reject an alliance. Given my penchant for prolix paragraphs and conditional contentions - a temporal alliance, all said and done, cannot rely on the only certain and unchanging constituent that is the eternal being, can it? - based on a reasonable understanding of matters, uttering an unqualified yes or no, to me, seems absurd. In fact, this would be worse than calling a head or a tail at the toss. Even before the toss that you can't control, after all, you try to have a grasp of everything that you can: is the coin fair? Based on your observation, is a head more probable or a tail?
Some time ago, though, I encountered this paradigm of questioning again. This time on live TV. Thankfully, I was only a spectator. Among my favorite TV shows is Karan Thapar's Devil's Advocate, and as he slashes his way through the heath and haze his guests conjure up in response to his well-researched questions, he tends to paraphrase them and seek from them an assent for his summary of their words. He asks them for a mere yes/no answer. He uses the same technique to weed out factual hyperbole and statistical subterfuge. His guests, mostly politicians and policy makers who are among the most eloquent orators in the country, usually digress in their reply, floundering from the pointed broadside. Answers roll off their tongues effortlessly when they can respond with a stream of words that has many qualifiers that hedge them against scrutiny. The one word test is a nightmare.
Even more recently, I have had a closer brush with this formidable form of querying. A horoscope that is an amalgamated rent agreement with the various celestial bodies, detailing their occupancy of the different sectors in the chart, a photograph, a flimsy bio-data that focuses more on the family, and a few awkward meetings are supposed to inform me adequately and enable me to accept or reject an alliance. Given my penchant for prolix paragraphs and conditional contentions - a temporal alliance, all said and done, cannot rely on the only certain and unchanging constituent that is the eternal being, can it? - based on a reasonable understanding of matters, uttering an unqualified yes or no, to me, seems absurd. In fact, this would be worse than calling a head or a tail at the toss. Even before the toss that you can't control, after all, you try to have a grasp of everything that you can: is the coin fair? Based on your observation, is a head more probable or a tail?
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