Why ranking of schools and students is wrong

As the country struggles to come up with a most suitable system to produce the most complete products out of high schools, there is still the issue of ranking of students that has gone unseen yet it is a rotting wound in schools.

For a long time now, schools have been using the ranking systems both on internal examinations and the external examinations and this has gone a long way in damaging how the students perform on the overall.

To begin with, the ranking of schools has led to unhealthy completion among students as well as among schools in external examinations. The students have majorly been aiming at how high they perform ahead of their colleagues in class or in another school. This has meant that they do not care and do not even have their own grades to achieve.

The aim has been to finish among the top performers in class. Even if the grade is unthinkable, the top student feels good being named ahead of everyone else instead of having their own goals to achieve.

The remedy of this is that schools should embrace teaching students in the best way possible and results be given to individuals instead of producing a list to indicate the first student to the last student.

Furthermore, ranking has led to widespread cheating as students strive to beat their colleagues in as many subjects as possible. Many of them are just obsessed with marks that will put them at the top of the class and do not even know how to generate the acquired results in the first place.

Students should be taught to be responsible students and not be exposed to competition through ranking. Most of the students and the teachers train themselves on how to be better than a neighboring school for example. In regions where schools do not perform so well, you find that they struggle to beat themselves which is like an insult to the education status of the region.

Ranking has also led to poor performance in technical subjects like Mathematics as students who struggle to be top of the ranking try to cook their way up there though cheating.

Many of them, however, do not know any known ways to cheat in Mathematics and therefore tend to abandon it to carry on with the subjects in which you can score the highest grade though prediction of questions and attempting answers on pieces of paper. This has led to producing of students that cannot do any innovative thing in real life.

Ranking of students and schools has also led to most students attaining unreasonable grades as most of them cheat when there is chance and then when the chance is taken away, they have to think for themselves. This has meant that students post unreasonable grades as there is a sharp variation in the grades attained in subjects where they cheated and the ones in which they did not.

In addition, ranking has led to many students just thinking about how to do well in exams and forget everything about being a complete person. After they do leave school and the life they start living does not require how well you perform on paper anymore, they begin going through a lot of problems and most of them do not recover until very late on life. Their self-esteem in the social aspect is damaged.

Ranking of both schools and students should be abolished and the issuance of results be made a private affair in which the student is given the results and an analysis of the targets vis a vis the grade on the table.

A student should not be treated depending on their ability to perform better than their colleagues as they have different abilities. School performance should as well be based on the abilities of the students at the school and not their performance in relation to the other school.