The title of this piece may suggest that I intend to make fun of the situation that the Department of English of the University of Dhaka now finds itself in. God forbid! I was myself a student of the department and spent the best years of my life teaching there.
My title alludes to a Pirandello play that all my former colleagues (and many readers) would be familiar with and points to the absurd situation that has developed because of the department’s search for students who qualify to study English literature. If I were still in the department, I would also join them in their search for students who we consider to be fit for our department.
As we all know by now, only two students out of a total of 1,364 candidates who appeared in the elective English exam were found fit!
What constitutes this fitness that I’m talking about? Ideally I think, a student of the English Department should have an interest in literature (we are not looking for “passion”) and a certain proficiency in the English language, which I believe can only be determined by a written component in the admission test.
The admission policy that existed until last year did not screen candidates for this element of interest and linguistic competence. Instead, students who secured a certain mark in the multiple-choice general English component gained admission to the department.
The department never had problems in filling up the requisite number of seats; we just did not fill them up with the right kind of students. And the right kind – I repeat – are students with an interest in literature and a certain level of linguistic ability.
To put it a bit more concretely, I would even hazard to say that an IELTS band score of 6 in speaking and writing would be acceptable for the department. I would be delirious with a band 7 candidate, happy with a band 6 student, but willing to resign myself to a 5.5 band freshman. But that’s a different story.
The elective English exam that was introduced this year was an attempt – a disastrous attempt I might add – to determine that elusive fitness factor for students seeking admission to the department. First, I should clearly state that the English Department en masse demanded separate entry requirements which included a written component in the admission test.
This was twice rejected by the Dean’s Committee. It was only after this failure that the English Department agreed to a compromise formula: A multiple-choice elective English made mandatory for all who sought admission in English. And that is where everything went wrong and 35 teachers found only two students worthy of their attention.
Of course this was not “intentional” as the education minister so rashly and angrily said at one of his press conferences. The department certainly did not want the education minister to become defensive about his ministry’s stupendous achievement in the education sector or to belittle the thousands of students who achieved GPA 5. Certainly the department also did not want the VC to become defensive about an admission system that worked reasonably well for other departments in the university.
It is a fact that there are other departments in the university who also set their own standards for admission. Why not English, which does indeed require a minimum level of proficiency in the English language? You can be an Einstein but you cannot get admission into the Faculty of Fine Arts without displaying some knowledge of drawing; you can be a Dr Johnson, but if your musical ability is as good as mine, the music department will not accept you. The argument is very basic, but bears repetition now as all kinds of accusations and counter-accusations are flying around.
The demand of the English Department to set its own standards of admission was therefore perfectly legitimate. What went wrong this time was in the design of the questions in elective English to set the standards. There is no reason to think that the standard of education at the primary, secondary, and higher secondary throughout the country had radically improved or deteriorated. And the admission policy also remained more or less unchanged. It was the elective English paper that was the only new element in the mix, and that is where the problem lies.
As I look at the elective English questions right in front of me, I get the feeling that the standard set by the question-setters is a much higher one than the one I set out earlier (linguistic competence of band 6. I have thrown “interest in literature” overboard). It is an unrealisable and impossible standard given the conditions of mainstream education in Bangladesh.
The questions appear to have been set for students who do not exist. Except for two. And if they do exist, they are mostly students from English-medium schools (IELTS band 7-8 students) who would either go abroad or study in one or two of the better-known private universities. The questions appear to display an odd mixture of elitism, arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence for which the department might have to pay a high price – the price of an opportunity missed.
The failure thus is not a failure of the students. It’s a failure of the questions (and the question-setters) to search out the best students from the existing pool of students. If we set questions to select 125 students from the 1,364 students who opted for elective English, then the questions have to be designed in such a way that at least 125 qualify – even if they do not fit our imagined notions of what an English Department student should be like. No department has the luxury to say that our students do not exist in Bangladesh, however close to reality that may be.
If you do that, you end up with only two students! Or you end up with no department! What is now likely is that the result of the elective English test will be completely scrapped, and the 125 seats of the English Department will be filled up by students who qualified in the General English test. The department will be back to square one, its genuine and legitimate efforts to attract better-qualified students having back-fired miserably.
But the struggle should not be given up: If departmental insistence, political clout, administrative sympathy, and realistic testing standards cohere, the English Department of the University of Dhaka will surely attract much better students than the ones we have had in the last few years.