Homework and exam: It’s easier to mark than it is to tackle.

Preposterous and obnoxious excuses of not completing or attempting homework have led teachers to even study tough topics like tautology. Dogs eat meat. My dog ate the homework. To prove the truth or otherwise of the later statement we need to check whether homework has some meat properties. If it does not, then this later statement must be wrong considering the factual first part of the tautology. In tautology if the first statement is true and what follows is wrong, the whole thing results in falsehood.

Some students even don’t bother to draw diagrams during normal class lessons. Writing class notes is very difficult a task for them notwithstanding that they are just required to copy from the chalk board what the teacher jots. How are such people expected to even look at a homework assignment? It is just asking too much from them. Please give them peace of mind by not bothering them with homework. Half an hour into a quiz, test or an exam, the same fellows are fast asleep, having discovered that the exam is far above there standard. They never miss in the noise makers’ list compiled by the class monitor. These are the same people who you find fast asleep in the course of a lesson.

During holidays students are expected to answer homework questions in all the subjects they take in school. These are usually standard exam papers for the necessary level of education. Most of the students remember of this homework few days before schools are due to reopen for a new term. During normal school days a student will have many friends to at least attempt to help out any time they are stuck with their homework. For holiday homework, however, every familiar person is absent. Your teachers and fellow students are nowhere to be seen. You find yourself forced to struggle with this homework on your own. Any available tuition teacher is only familiar with art subjects and languages. Sciences, technical and business subjects are hard to secure a reliable holiday tuition teacher while any available teacher for these subjects charges exorbitantly.

Helpers of homework go diminishing as one climbs the ladder of education. A kindergarten toddler has everyone scrambling to help in the homework. Mum, the house help, the gardener, cook, impromptu visitors and including anyone in the vicinity, easily serves as a teacher to the toddler. A drunken uncle or neighbour who imp-promptly pays a visit usually cannot resist the urge to serve as a teacher to the toddler. Never mind the fact that he never went to any school. Some believe that beer has this ingredient which gives someone unusual confidence. Usually dad takes over the task occasionally when the kid climbs up the ladder in their primary education. They say when things get really tough it is time for the man to take over. However there are those dads who cannot be trusted by their children when it comes to homework helping. The kid discovers that anytime dad helps out they get a thorough beating in school next day for extremely and obviously wrong answers. The teacher can’t possibly comprehend how someone can come up with such strangely wrong answers, unless of course they never in the first place attempt to read the questions.

Homework is usually done in the sitting room in the case of primary school children. It is therefore easy to monitor such children to ensure that they at least attempt these pieces of work. For older pupils and students this homework is done in the comfort of their private rooms in the main house. No one is able to supervise it. In any case the topics are too hard for anyone in the household so that it is better and safer to keep a safe distance from the room where the homework is purportedly being done in, rest you are asked to help out. No one nears you when you are busy with your homework rest you ask for some help in that direction.

You have often seen these kids who do their homework in a speeding morning public transport bus. They use their friend’s back as a makeshift desk. Never mind the kind of writing that will emanate from the whole episode. This are times when they demand their friend’s exercise book for the purpose of copying. Under such circumstances you find instances where they even copy their friend’s names so that eventually the teacher gets mixed up. Someone has submitted two sets of homework with different handwritings! These are instances when even the family dog gets a mention in the whole mess, being accused of having eaten the homework. Other cases are when a kid refuses to prepare to go to school in the morning simply because they have not attempted their homework.

Furthermore, you wonder how they are able to pull this homework writing in a moving public transport bus. They struggle to finish their homework even under this precarious condition. The bus might be moving at a very high speed to bit the morning traffic jam and it is a wonder therefore how these children manage to concentrate. I am sure that some of the handwritings resulting from this high speed “homework” is eligible even to an experienced teacher. Imagine the vehicle negotiating tight corners and hitting pumps and potholes while the kid is deep in concentration. The resulting handwriting might not even be comprehensible to the author, leave alone the marker of the piece of homework. If you can do homework in moving buses you don’t have to miss your TV soap opera star simply because the teacher was kind enough to load you with homework. Enjoy the soap, the morning bus is coming.

Students are forced to carry a lot of their books home for reference as they attempt their homework. This has been accepted as the norm by society. Any student going home empty handed is viewed with suspicion. This is especially if it is a girl student. During the course of the holiday these text books are usually not made available to the students. Most teachers will not trust the students with the text books outside the vicinity of the school. This, they have learnt from experience when some students change schools abruptly with no effort to clear from their previous school, thereby making off with school property. Most of the holiday time of the student is therefore taken up by searching for students who might be in a position to lend them the necessary text books. This task is most cases turn to be fruitless forcing the student to use their sketchy class notes to attempt the holiday homework.

Today there are facilities for students to fish study materials online. Various universities have come up with websites to serve as information portals and hubs. Here students from various schools and colleges have the opportunity to interact online. You are able to find help and suggestions from your peers concerning your school homework and assignments. The sites also have a pool of study material at the disposal of the students. Links to eBooks and eLibrary can also be made available which come in handy for students lacking in hard copy of text books.

In an interview between Professor Bertrand Meyer and Professor Peter Wedmayer both of ETH Zurich interesting things are discussed. Checking that a solution is correct is much much easier than finding the solution in the first place. If you have a huge puzzle of many pieces and have to solve it, this will take a long time but once you solved it and I look at it, it is very quick for one to verify if it is correct or not. That is what people believe. But it is only a belief. That is a very strange thing. In a railway station, arranging railway cars in the right order takes a lot of time and effort. But when they are finally arranged correctly it is now easier to check whether they are in the right order. Again that is just what society believes. Society’s take: The teacher gives homework or exam to a student. It is difficult for the student to tackle the questions but once that is done it is quite easy for the teacher to mark this homework or exam. They only need to ensure the answers are in line with those in the marking scheme. Again this has not substantially been proofed, scientifically or otherwise, to be the truth. It is only what the society believes.