On July 2, the Madras High Court directed the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur to redo its rank list for this year’s IIT Joint Entrance Examination . This followed from a writ petition filed by a student who contended it was not fair to give equal preference to those who had properly followed the instructions in the question paper and those who hadn’t. As per the instructions, all numerical answers had to be rounded off to the second decimal place. Therefore, the petitioner contended, even if the answer was an integer, say, 7, it had to be written as 7.00.
The court allowed this contention and ruled that those who had followed the instructions correctly would have to be ranked above those who did not do so. When IIT Kanpur appealed this decision, a division bench of the Madras High Court stayed the previous order calling it “unwarranted”.
This debate raises the philosophical question of what the role of education is. Is it to train students to follow rules or is it to stimulate them to ponder and deduce the sense behind the lessons? Science and scientific method suggest that the latter is closer to the true purpose of education, particularly because the appeal of accuracy and reproducibility far outweighs the power of rules.
For example, consider the study of units and measurements. The International System of Units has, as base units, seven members including second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela. Measurements of base units are defined according to agreed standards maintained by the International Bureau for Weights and Measures.
For instance, while the unit of time is the second, how long exactly is the second? The answer: “It is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of Caesium 133.” Compare this to its earlier definition as 1/86,400 of a mean solar day – which, while having an appeal for its apparent simplicity, is much harder to precisely measure or check for being a standard value.
The exact length of one metre was the distance between two marks on a rod made of a platinum-iridium alloy securely housed in Paris. This artefact was retired long ago. As D.K. Aswal of National Physical Laboratory, Delhi, writes in an article in Current Science, since 1960, the metre has been defined in terms of the wavelength of light from krypton 86 radiation, hence, is derivable from nature. This dispensed with the need for the platinum-iridium rod.
The obsession with conventions is not the only problem with the Indian attitude to education, but it is an issue that must be tackled if we wish to move ahead. In this venture, the firm but light, and entirely alterable, grasp that science has on conventions can serve as a guiding sign.
The writer covers science for The Hindu
