Friday dailies welcomed the readers by displaying the jubilant faces of successful SSC students, the future generation to usher in a luminous future. They are smiling, hugging one another, giving pose for the next day's newspaper and doing everything that suits the occasion. The print media and the electronic media rendered highest attention to holding the moments of unfathomable joy of the glorious victors who passed out successfully the first public exam of their life. The readers and viewers came to know the secrets of the triumphant students how many hours they spent for studying, to whom they are indebted most—in every detail. The story of success of some impecunious students-- who refused to bow down to poverty because of their unquenchable thirst for knowledge--attains the fairy tale flavour.

However, what has escaped the notice of many is the sigh of frustration and helplessness of those who believe that they could distinguish themselves more distinctively had the grading system been different. My point is very clear--the existing system has removed the difference between 'very good' and 'good' since a student can attain 'golden A+' by scoring just 80% marks separately in every subject. Finding no credit for scoring the highest percentage, it has been the prime concern to secure only 80% and this tendency will obvi-• ' ously deteriorate the overall standard.

The SSC results of 2008 are marked by a tremendous leap of 13.82 point from last year’s pass percentage and the number of A+ achievers rose by about 20,000.1 feel that the satisfaction of having so many 'good' students has

been bought at the expense of the dissatisfaction of 'very good' students. Does it look convincing that there is no difference between the 1st and the 700th student of the same institution? There are institutions where hundreds of students have been endowed with A+ and the stern reality of a flawed grading system has placed all of them on the same vessel while many of them are unable to stand the preliminary sickness of a sea voyage.

The present system is an injustice in two ways firstly, it has lowered the status of the 'excellent' students down and secondly, it has upgraded the status of the average students. The first group is getting demoralized and the second misguided, being unable to estimate their real worth.

I don't suggest that the grading system be done away with, since it is the latest yardstick to measure the performance of the students. However, we may opt for some reformative measures to remove the prevalent incongruity by forming another grade between 80-100% or selecting percentage of different grades for different subjects every yeardike O' level exams.). In this context, I would like to allude to Tagore's Shesher Kabita' where Amit Roy (protagonist of the novel through whom Tagore speaks) says-“Good things are good because they are few in number, otherwise they would be average being overcrowded by their own variety". The smiling faces that pervaded the-front pages of the last Friday’s dailies are faces of the good' students, not of the 'very good', let alone'excellent'.

Samyasathee

Sagarpara, Ghoramara, Rajshahi