On honor and metrics: Looking at actual systems that work
Whenever the issues regarding the grading system, honor roll qualifications, and the transmutation table are discussed, I cannot help but think of the University of the Philippines School of Health Sciences (UP SHS) and its own system that measures a different number.
According to its data, 95 percent of its graduates have opted to serve their respective communities, leading to more places in the country being served by health-care workers. They become midwives, nurses, and doctors who go beyond expectations, tread the harder paths, and serve the underserved. They chose to stay and serve the communities where they learned.
But what is more interesting is that the grading system implemented in this school only has two remarks: passed and needs tutorials, a far cry from the present grading system that the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and even the rest of the UP System implements. According to the school itself, it is because the school aims for its students to “develop competencies rather than compete for grades.”
And it is important to point out that students here are not admitted through UPCAT. They are not admitted through their stellar high school grades or exemplary talent, which is another method to gain a slot in any of the units of the university. They are nominees of underserved communities, who send them to the school in response to their needs and the students’ own will, truly reflecting the “iskolar ng bayan” moniker bestowed upon them.
But more than encouraging our graduates to stay, this system is a juxtaposition of how an education system focused on developing skills that serve the nation resulted in changed communities and changed lives. This is a system that showed excellence not through numbers, but through genuine service to the nation.
We cannot simply blame the present while forgetting the steps we took in the past. We cannot cherry-pick whatever system we had in the past and place it into the present, then expect that it will lead to better results. We cannot reimplement the top 10, the homogeneous sections, or previous grading systems.
They are systems that were tested and resulted in similar conditions. The only difference now is that because of the failures in our system that have been there for decades, they have been exacerbated to the point that they are painfully visible.
To our education leaders, to educators like myself, this is a point of reflection for all of us. Maybe we should not dream of the past as a shining pathway to solutions. Maybe we should look elsewhere—at actual systems that have worked.
The UP SHS is showing us a different approach–an approach that is working. Its system shows us that excellence is not always exemplified through test scores, through competition for a limited number of awards, or through whatever grade equivalency. It tells us that numbers do not mean anything if they cannot serve their ultimate purpose: to serve others. And what metric will be greater than our own students choosing to serve the community where they came from, returning to the places that nurtured their first steps?
Maybe, just maybe, we should shift our educational philosophy from squeezing numbers from our students while treating them as gladiators in the coliseum to what the UP SHS has done: letting students develop themselves as human beings, operating in a community they build together while appreciating the weight of their education—the education that will eventually change this nation for the better.
John Heart Lacorte Gaviño,
gavinojohnheart@gmail.com
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