Standardisation – A Different Perspective From Dr. M.Y.M. Siddeek’s

By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –December 26, 2016

Prof. S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole

Dividing Histories

There was a Faculty Board Meeting once in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s. A brilliant Sinhalese scientist was praised for all the G.C.E. A. Level (AL) A-grades he got with admission to read engineering and for choosing instead to read science. A Tamil academic from the same batch as his openly disagreed, “All standardized A’s.” The allusion was to Sinhalese being given the grade of A with much lower than the customary 75 marks while Tamils were required to get much more; while Sinhalese passed with much lower than 40 marks while Tamils needed to score a lot more than 40 to pass. Another Sinhalese from the same batch vehemently denied that grades were meddled with. As tempers rose, Professor B.A. Abeywickrama (who headed the inquiry into allegations that Tamil examiners favoured Tamil students, and after inquiry dismissed those allegations) was fortunately present as the External Member of the Faculty Board. He said with his economic use of words, “Yes it happened.” The Board then moved on to other things.

That is human psychology. When a parent steals or commits some other wrong, the children have a way of believing otherwise. A father is always a loved hero. Likewise it is with communities. When a community advances at the expense of others, it always creates a false history to believe it acted honourably. That is the story of standardisation. That is why I find Dr. Siddeek’s narrative disturbing. The Faculty Board episode shows how divided we are on this subject with our own wishful histories.

My Personal Experience – Not Feeling Ceylonese

I sat the AL Exam in Dec. 1969 (with practical examinations in April 1970). Those were good days when education was a pleasant enterprise. I went for cricket and football in the neighbourhood during the first and third terms respectively. I borrowed a novel a day from the well-stocked Jaffna Public Library, especially during the second term when I had little interest in athletics. I did not go for a single tuition class because I knew some who had entered for engineering with IC 3S the previous year. I thought with upward standards, I could get 2C 2S and still make it. That seemed no problem. So I continued in my laidback lifestyle. I enjoyed life as any schoolboy should.

By June or so I got my admission with about 150 others to read engineering at Peradeniya. There were 103 Tamil medium students, 20 English medium students and 27 Sinhalese medium students. (My numbers may be slightly off since there were about 145 students at the cutoff mark, I recall, of 239, with 9 more at 238 taking whom would have broken the 150 limit for our only Engineering Faculty at Peradeniya then. So there was one list with 145 admissions and another with 154. The English medium would have contained all three communities, adding to the lack of exactness – Muslims, and third-shy Tamils and Sinhalese. Ours had the last batch of English medium students who were at their third and last shy for university admission. For the 1967 and previous ALs, since all science students sat in English, the question as to whether one was Tamil or Sinhalese never arose over admissions).

Previously Peradeniya’s engineering was split 50-50 between Sinhalese and Tamils. How can one community suddenly fare so much better, it was asked? There was a cry of foul. Tamil graders over-marked they alleged.

Mrs. Bandaranaike had just come in as Prime Minister in May 1970. She suspended our admissions and appointed a Royal Commission to go through the papers of us 154 who had been admitted. There was a nail biting wait. I feared the worst, thinking perhaps that Tamil examiners had indeed over-marked us! It was finally announced in the Daily News to my relief that there was no difference and if there was, Tamil examiners had been a little stricter.

That did not stop the allegations. The majority could not accept that they had not worked hard enough. If the examiners were fair, then Tamil lecturers at Peradeniya who routinely go home to Jaffna during the December vacation were alleged to have distributed questions to us. How else could Tamils fare better? Ratwatte, the PM’s brother, went on a protest march to Colombo. Posters appeared at Peradeniya saying that if we came there, the Mahaweli River would flow with our blood.

We were called cheats. It did not feel nice. I knew I did not get any questions before the exams. We did not feel Ceylonese with all these accusations. It rendered the nation into two.

There was silence from the government. September when we would have been asked to report at the university, came and went. The lists for the other faculties were not released. Then in December or so the bottom 44 of the 103 Tamils students – including myself – got a dirty-looking recycled piece of paper with a cyclostyled letter on which our names were written in ugly handwriting, asking us to report at the Ceylon College of Technology (CCT) in Katubedde to read for the “B.Sc. Eng. degree.”

The admission list had been redone adding 28 marks to the 4-subject aggregate of all Sinhalese students. Our places were taken by Sinhalese students allegedly because Sinhalese were disadvantaged vis-à-vis Tamils . A Sinhalese Permanent Secretary’s son from Colombo moved into Peradeniya because he was allegedly disadvantaged. A Tamil street sweeper’s son from Jaffna was moved out because he was allegedly advantaged!

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