By Danilo P. Padua, PhD
Graduation ceremonies in both private and public Higher Education institutions for the SY 2022-2023 are done. I believe most graduates, if not all, were wearing smiles of relief. Many smiles, I think though, were meant to say, thank you pandemic .
It’s very interesting to note that many schools, including those universities ranked by some world university higher education ranking agencies, produced avalanches of graduates with Latin honors-cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude. Was this the result of an improving educational standards, an upgraded school faculty and staff, greater support of school administrators, or simply due to students becoming academically better focused and prepared?
There was a news report about a school somewhere in Mindanao where about 78.5% of its graduates were conferred Latin honors. This was unthinkable before the pandemic set in. Even the University of the Philippines, the leading university in the country, admitted that they produced an unusually high number of magna and summa cum laudes. It’s not really normal
The Benguet State University was in the same boat. Graduates with Latin honors came in bunches. How was this phenomenon (yes, I call it a phenomenon) became possible?
Before school officials concerned will grin in contentment, let’s take just a casual peak into the situation. The pandemic took all of 3 years, not counting the year 2023. That means, those who graduated for the SY 2022-2023 had merely a year where they were subjected to the usual set up of face-to-face meetings, quizzes and examinations. So one can just imagine that students had to toil so hard in order just to pass.
I had a dorm mate in college who got a grade of 1.50 but tried to argue with his professor to give him a grade of 1.0 because he was aiming for a higher Latin honor, reasoning that his total points is already very near the highest possible grade. The result was negative. That’s how difficult it was during pre-pandemic time how to secure a Latin honor. If that guy were in the pandemic time, he would surely have gotten his wish.
During the pandemic from 2020-2022, the school system shifted from the usual classroom teaching and out of the room instructions, especially for practical purposes, to online-being confined to private homes or internet cafes later. Learners were forced to find ways on how they can cope up with the abrupt changes. They had to cough up money for this.
The online system of instruction called for teachers to immerse themselves more in the internet to help them prepare for good lessons. Various times, the faculty members met problems like blackouts, malfunctions of their gadgets, household distractions, etc. hindering their faster delivery of a well-prepared lessons and even set of exams. In short, they found the system a bit more laborious and prone to a lot of unnecessary impediments. In the process, they immensely appreciated the problems that their students had surely experienced as they did. Somehow this, aside from the schools’ policy of being more humane in dealing with the situation, made them relax their usual standard of giving grades. The result is obvious. Students got higher grades, if they submitted their online requirements, helped by their huge effort to go online as adjudged by their professors.
Atty Julie Binaldo-Velasco, a BSU professor at the College of Public Administration and Governance, sees some problems with the online learning system for the usual courses. According to her, there was no proper assessment of the work of students. She partly qualified this by saying that students may not be the only ones doing their requirements, written or otherwise. “There was no way to determine this”, she quipped matter-of-factly.
There were times when the person attending the online class, according to her, were not the actual students. “That’s why, there was a time that I scolded a parent who attended the onlineclass in lieu of her child”, she related. One thing more according to her, students had all the time to look for answers to the examination questions given to them from the internet. Besides, no one would know whether their answers were their own, copied from or made by others. If the answers are very good, teachers had no recourse but give a high grade. Because of these, Atty Binaldo is not actually in full agreement with the present online system of teaching college courses.
More than ever, the online system proves what one of my college professor said before that grades are just decorations, they are not actual measures of intelligence of a student. I agree with that but I add this: better to get good decorations, and that grades may not be a measure of intelligence but they are a measure of the student preparation- which touches on discipline.
In another sense, grading in HEIs in the Philippines are not standardize. Some schools like U.P. and B.S.U. have numerical grades of 1-5, 1 being the highest. Others have the reverse. Not only that, they have a variation which is 1-4 only, 4 as the highest. Others have the 70-100, 100 being equivalent to 1.0. Still others have A-E, Wirth A being the highest. This is very confusing. If students transfer from one school to another , they have to get a certification of the grading system of their current school to be submitted to their intended transfer school before they can be admitted.
I don’t think, this is part of the so-called academic freedom. CHED should do something about this to spare a little difficulty of students transferring from one school to another.
By the way, do you know that there is an abortion road in La Trinidad? Try driving from Km 3 to Km 6 in La Trinidad, and you will know what I mean. To think that the asphalt road in the aforementioned stretch was laid out only second quarter of this year?
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