XAT 2014 — Decision Making Question 5
Read the following case – let and answer the questions that follow.
Ms. Banerjee, class teacher for 12th standard, wants to send teams (based on past performance) of three students each to district, state, national, and international competition in mathematics. Till now, every student of the class has appeared in 100 school level tests. The students had following distribution of marks in the tests, in terms of “average” and “number of times a student scored cent per cent marks”.
Ms. Banerjee has carefully studied chances of her school winning each of the competitions. Based on in-depth calculations, she realized that her school is quite likely to win district level competition but has low chances of winning the international competition. She listed down the following probabilities of wins for different competitions. Prize was highest for international competition and lowest for district level competition (in that order).
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All the students are studying in the school for last twelve years. She wanted to select the best team for all four competitions (Ms. Banerjee had no other information to select students).
Consider merit pay for teachers. Schools face constant pressure to change their management approaches to improve performance, which is usually assessed by standardized reading, math, and science scores. In most school teacher’s pay is determined by seniority, years of total teaching experience, and credentials. Pay is rarely based on performance, which is contrary to the belief among parents and private sector. Parents and business leaders lament that there are no carrots/sticks used to motivate teachers. Consequently, there has been greater push to implement some form of merit pay to improve the motivation
Which of the following statements will disapprove the claim of the parents and business leaders?
Answer & solution
A recent study suggested that teachers are self – motivated.
- B
Teachers are largely motivated, by financial incentives; so pay for performance will induce greater and more effective effort.
- C
Learning cannot be measured reliably and accurately by a test given once a year.
- D
Teaching is a solo – activity, there is a little interdependence with other co – curricular and extra – curricular activities in the school.
- E
To err is human. And hence stick should be used to reduce errors.
The claim made by parents and business leaders is that it is lamentable that “there are no carrots/sticks used to motivate teachers”. The option that disproves this claim is option 1 because if teachers are self-motivated, the provision of merit pay would not help in motivating them in any manner.
Option 2 supports the claim made by the parents instead of disproving it by indicating that financial incentives would work in motivating teachers. Eliminate option 2.
Option 3 disputes the yardstick used for assessing the performance of the teachers but does not pertain specifically to the claim made by parents and business leaders.
Options 4 and 5 do not bear any effect on the mentioned claim.
Hence, the correct answer is option 1.