Handwriting Matters in Examinations!

As a faculty member at a university, one of the tasks that I do regularly is the invigilation of the examination process. As I go to the examination room, I see many of the students concentrating on their scripts, but something keeps bothering me every single time. There seem to be a lot of students who cannot write immediately, quickly or spontaneously. These students are clearly aware of the things that they have been taught. It is not the lack of knowledge that is the issue. What is a concern is that these students cannot communicate what they know in writing form.
The first problem that I observe is the way that the student holds their pen. Some students hold their pens in such an awkward way that it is really hard for them to write for any period of time. An examination does not last for just five minutes; it is an exam that may require one to write continuously for about two or three hours. The handwriting of the student would start becoming bad at the very end of the test because of the way they were holding pens.
What accounts for this? The reason can be sought not in the exam room but far beyond, back in the elementary and high school classrooms. For most of these students, nobody bothered to teach them the right way to hold a pen when they were younger. Handwriting is a physical skill, just like riding a bike or swimming. It needs to be taught while the child is still young and needs to be taught gently and with patience while it is being learned. Once the student comes into university with the bad habit practiced over a decade or more, it becomes exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to correct.
The second problem is that many students do not understand how to format their scripts. Students do not understand how to make a margin, where to make the margin, or what amount of spacing to keep between two lines. What I find is that some students will make scripts in which there is very little margin on both sides of the paper, and they start from the left and go till the right side of the paper.

At first glance, this may appear to be a minor concern, but this is far from being the case. If an answer script is cluttered and unorganised, it would be hard to read. Letters blend into each other. An examiner would need to pause, look more carefully at the letters and even guess what the word really means. Even if the answer was right and all information is present, an unreadable and oddly structured script would create a bad first impression, which counts in examinations more than anyone would want to admit. It happens quite often that an answer script, despite containing accurate information, gets graded worse than it should simply due to lack of readability or organisation of the script.
It is just not fair to the students. They have put in their time, they know their stuff, and now they are getting marked down not for their content knowledge, but for the way in which they have presented it. Clean, well-handwritten papers and organised pages are not frivolous embellishments. They play an integral role in the communication of the information from one person to the other, and the reader only has so long to take it in.
Fixing this problem needs to start long before the university level. It needs to be addressed now, right away. It needs to be taken seriously that schools, especially elementary schools, need to be teaching handwriting in class as something that’s important enough to spend some time doing properly. Children need to be taught the right way to hold the pencil, write with proper posture, and understand the importance of taking time to make the letters readable.
But the obligation does not end with elementary education. With each successive class, the child ought to be reminded and guided in how to write specifically for examinations. To write a paper in the comfort of one’s home and with unlimited time is very different from writing in examination halls and under time constraints. Students need to learn how to write fast but remain neat. They need to be taught directly how to write with margins, how to space their lines, how to underline certain points and how to write answers in a manner which appears organised and well-structured before the examiner reads even a word of the answer.
There is a part of teachers and parents in all this. Just a simple practice, such as forcing one’s child to write neatly in their exercise books as opposed to scribbling, can have huge impacts over time. Schools can also take a little bit of time each week, perhaps a few minutes for handwriting practices.
Neat, organised handwriting is no small issue. It is something that will determine the ability of a student to effectively present his knowledge and, in turn, will affect the performance of that student in exams. Students who understand everything about a topic but lack the ability to present themselves are worse off than those with average understanding but who present themselves perfectly.
It is high time that we started to take handwriting seriously and treat it as a foundational skill. And if we begin doing this now and continue through the higher classes, then we will be able to help our students convey what they know and get the grades that they deserve.
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The writer is Assistant Professor of English at Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology, Dhaka