Failure and Fear

I failed the first ever test I wrote. It was the entrance test for admission to 1st standard of English medium in my school. It was a dreadful day. For the entire duration of that test everyone spoke in English - right from the directions to my seat, to the instructions. I hardly understood a thing of it. In the exam, I could only complete A,B,C,D… and spellings of numerals one to 10. I scored 7, yes seven!, out of 40. I failed! Of course, we could have blamed the system - how can a child who doesn’t understand English pass? And how cruel the competition is and how inconsiderate the school teachers and so on. My parents could have said, we would never see the face of this school.

 But my parents knew better! They knew how important it is to fail and yet not give up. After this failure, my mother said, "language of instruction doesn’t matter, lets try Marathi medium!". But their test was already done. The last resort was to try our luck for 5 seats that got allocated through some Zilla Parishad lottery. My parents took the chance and it worked! I got the Marathi medium seat, and it changed my life. I dont know how I would have turned out had I been to some other school, but what my school taught me has made all the difference in my life. More on that in some other article.

 People will say the entry test was flawed - yes it was!, but it taught me a very important life lesson - when you aren't good enough you lose out. Nobody bothers about your circumstances, nobody gives a damn about your constraints, if you want to go to the highest level you just have to perform. The failure taught me that if I don’t do well, I will fail and I need to work hard to ensure I don’t fail. From that day on, I never failed a single exam. I somehow always found a way to cross 40s in even the most difficult engineering subjects. I did not write IIT entrance -pure lack of awareness and I wrote CAT multiple times but my percentile was always in 90s so that is not a failure. Did the first failure matter in the longer run? No! Not getting into English medium of my school hardly changed anything for me. Perhaps I know Marathi much better than my English medium friends.

So does it mean one should try to fail? Never! While failure does teach a lot - failing in exams is not the best kind of failure as it is almost always avoidable. So what's the point of this story about failure and fear? Well, the new education policy just came out and I have an important suggestion. We should not do away with failing students. There should not be any exams where students cannot fail!

These days hardly anybody fails. Even in institutions of National repute, there are some exams that nobody can fail. When we don’t fail the incompetent in an exam, we are setting them up for a failure in life. I will use a metaphor from the game of Cricket - where I repeatedly failed and hardly ever succeeded. The pitch of life is a green bouncy, seaming wicket where you need great skill to score runs. If we prepare our children on exams of flat wickets, they will have great record on those flat wickets but will fail miserably on the hard bouncy wicket of life. The examination system should be life-like. Life has not done away with failure and hence our examination system should not. I am not saying that students should be failed on purpose, but anyone who is not competent should be allowed to fail.

 When you fail in your school or college, you get another chance to make amends. Of course there is some amount of shame and disappointment but that is temporary. Once you improve your performance and gain competence, you pass and you earn your respect. Contrast it with an exam where everyone passes, even someone who doesn’t have the requisite competence. After you've passed such an exam, you don’t really know if you are good enough. When you know that anyone who isn't good enough fails and you haven't; you have the confidence that you are good enough. But when nobody fails, people especially with lesser marks always think "do I really have it in me?"

 When you fail in real life, it has bigger consequences. Many times you hardly get another chance. To go back to a Cricketing analogy - failing in school or college exam is like getting out in the nets. In net practice you can get out multiple times it doesn’t have any impact but when you get out in a real match you don’t get another chance. Schools and colleges are the nets for real life. If we don’t teach children that unless they are good enough they will fail, we are doing a disservice to them. Failure is the first stepping stone towards success and we should not remove it from our academic system.

 Some might argue, why fail children at young age? Doesn’t it demoralize and disappoint them? Well, to shield someone from disappointment of failure is like trying to shield an athlete from pain. No matter how big a player you are, when you play a sport there will be pain. You will get hit, your body might ache due to injury or tiredness, there will always be pain. The same way, the moment there is expectation of doing well, there will always be disappointments. Rather than trying to shield children from disappointments we should teach them how to deal with disappointments. Everyone fails at something sometime, it is how you deal with the failure that defines you. While it may be okay not to fail children in primary classes, not failing the incompetent in higher classes is inexplicable.

 Let us now take a look at the business and economic implications of not failing the incompetent. While everyone likes to talk of kindness when it comes to business, only outcomes matter. How many of us will employ a cook who has a certificate in cooking but who cant even knead the dough? I doubt hardly anyone - specially when you can buy a kneading machine and also have multiple competent human choices. Replace kneading dough with any other skill and your choices will remain same - when there is a competent alternative available why employ an incompetent one? So when everyone makes decisions purely based on competency, how fair is it to expect someone to employ someone who hasn’t failed in exam but doesn’t have the competency?

 Last but not the least, Fear is sometimes the best motivator. Washing hands every time one comes home from outside is a good habit. But before CoVID19 set in a lot of us did not do it. Post CoVID, thanks to the fear of getting Corona, most of us thoroughly wash hands. Fear of losing their top position makes great players practice harder and continue to improve. Same way fear of failing in exams compels students to work hard and improve their competence. When they don’t fail, they get the confidence in their competence but when they can't fail they don't get that confidence. I could write all this today because I have failed multiple times and learned every time. While I don’t want to be failure in future, as an entrepreneur I can easily fail. The real fun is in accepting your failure, working hard and not failing the next time. I wish none of you ever fail any exam - but not because you can't but because you deserved to pass it.