Recently, the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission declared selection lists of Assistant Professors for the Higher Education Department (Degree Colleges) for various subjects. One of my friends, I can’t mention his name, let me call him X, fell prey to the outdated and illogical system of evaluation and selection. The system evaluates numbers over quality and real merit. The system says those who obtain 90% or more marks are meritorious, thus giving weightage to numbers over real merit. The system doesn’t evaluate how one gets 95% marks and the other gets only 65% marks, but at two different universities given the same system of education at both universities. Let us discuss this some other time; let me focus on X. X had spent his entire life chasing a singular dream—becoming an Assistant Professor. From his early student days, he had been a dedicated scholar, mastering his subject with relentless effort. He had cleared NET, completed his PhD, published qualitative research that too good number of publications , and even gained teaching experience. By all means, he was a deserving candidate. But when the final selection list was released, a cold and unforgiving decimal—0.10—stood between him and his dream. He had missed the cut by a margin so thin it was almost laughable. But there was no humor in it—only a devastating sense of loss. The system had ruled against him, not because he lacked knowledge or skill, but because his final computed score was just a fraction below the required threshold.
The System That Ignores Context: X sat in disbelief, questioning everything. Did the system even care where candidates had studied? Some universities had lenient marking, awarding higher percentages, while others were notoriously rigid, making it nearly impossible for students to score at par. X had graduated and post graduated from a university that followed strict evaluation standards, where securing a first division itself was an achievement. Yet, in the selection system, his hard-earned percentage was placed on the same scale as those who came from institutions that generously inflated marks, some up to 90%. Did the system consider that a student from a premier university with 65% might actually have worked harder than a student from another university with 90%? No, it simply tallied numbers, pretending all degrees were earned under the same conditions.
“Shouldn’t real teaching potential, research impact, and practical contributions matter more than just a rigid numerical threshold?”
A System That Selects Numbers, Not Scholars: This needs to change, merit doesn’t mean numbers, but beyond numbers.X wondered—did the evaluators truly believe that those who qualified by a margin of 0.10 or 0.20 were intellectually superior to him? Or was it simply that their numbers fit the system’s cut-off or benchmark—they say to it? If the selection process was truly about merit, shouldn’t there be a deeper evaluation beyond decimal points? Shouldn’t real teaching potential, research impact, and practical contributions matter more than just a rigid numerical threshold? But the system was blind. It did not see potential. It did not account for academic diversity. It did not recognize the subjectivity of evaluation practices across universities. It only counted numbers, failing to acknowledge that the decimal points deciding careers were often products of institutional differences, not differences in merit.
The Cost Of An Unyielding System: X had spent over a decade preparing for this. The sacrifice, the nights spent researching, the time invested in shaping himself as an educator—it all amounted to nothing in the face of a bureaucratic decimal. His dream, his career, his future—all lost to a mathematical oversight disguised as a fair selection process. He watched as others, many from institutions with lenient evaluations, celebrated their success. He did not begrudge them, but he questioned the system that failed to acknowledge the nuances of academic evaluation. If only merit was measured beyond numbers, if only the system recognized real effort, if only selection processes did not equate different academic backgrounds as identical, he might not have been standing here today, wondering if his entire life’s work had just been wasted over 0.10. But the system did not care. And that was the real failure.
(The author a freelancer a teacher and a researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora is also Advisor at The Nature University Kashmir. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
Dr. Ashraf Zainabi
