Who Gets To Decide?

The night before my English final of my second semester, probably the last English course I’ll take in my life. As I write this, it’s raining outside. A few minutes ago, it was raining so hard that I could hear it even with my earphones in. I am overcome with this strange feeling, part anxiety, part dread- for the week that’s about to come. But I’ll put that aside for now, because even though I get this feeling a lot, it’s only temporary. A lot can happen in a week, but what’s the use in trying to predict the future. 

As I prepare for my final exam tomorrow, I can’t help but think about my relationship with the subject over the years. English was almost forced onto us from before we could decide which language we wanted to speak. All my school life, I pretty much knew that English is my first language, regardless of whether my mother tongue was something else. A double-edged sword- I took pride in my strong grasp on the English language, while also feeling a slight sense of shame that I would take what felt like two business days to read a simple sentence in Hindi, something I think I have improved on. The praise I received for my writing skills was a constant throughout my school career. However, that all changed when I entered university. 

In the first year of law school, we have a mandatory English course. It beats me as to why, but I appreciated it nonetheless. It was the first lecture in my first semester time table, probably the only one I would like to wake up at 8:30 am for. In my mid-term for that class, I received a score, not entirely alien to me, but something I would have gotten in subjects like maths or physics, essentially things I had little to no acumen for. I cried on the moss-filled steps outside my college entrance, my self-perception was so deeply hampered that day. I’m not one to cry over a bad score, in fact, I usually find myself mocking people who do, “Have they never experienced a real problem in life? Crying over marks of all things.” But that day, for a short while, I felt like one of the only things I was supposed to be good at had escaped from my control, and I felt defeated. In a year where everything, and I mean almost everything in my life, had changed, this was not something I had ever accounted for. My seniors found me in that sorry state and cheered me up, telling me it’s a rite of passage to have your ass handed to you after coming to college. 

A few days later, while I was discussing with my professor about where I went so horribly wrong, he said something that stuck out. While talking about his metric for a good answer, he said, “I don’t like when people beat around the bush in their answers. Not that you’ve done that, you’ve missed the mark entirely.” It was funny, I laughed, only because I’ve gotten used to not taking myself so seriously in these situations. But every time I think about that interaction, a question arises in my head: Who gets to decide what is good and bad? Is it the professors who’ve spent years of their lives studying one discipline? It certainly seems justified that they would be qualified to judge whether hundreds of kids have accurately interpreted a text, then again, that’s just based on their interpretation…right? Is it the AI detector that said my paper was 40% AI-generated because it was coherent? Is it you, reading this blog post right now? Is it me? Probably not. 

In this world of nuance and subjectivity, when did we start assigning scores to everything? Apps are made on the entire premise of rating books, films and even food from 1 to 5. Who gets to decide what’s a 1 and what’s a 5? While some might think flowery language deserves a 10/10, others think the exact opposite, that it’s a mere sign of pretentiousness. Men and women spend an unbelievable amount of time rating people on how attractive they are; she’s a 10, but she believes in zodiac signs, he’s a 10, but his favourite director is Tarantino. You’re probably a 10, but you feel the need to assign a numerical value to everything. A number that doesn’t even have a fixed value attached to it. 

So I ask you again, who gets to decide? Some might argue that you can decide whatever you please, because at the end of the day, it’s your life. However, I argue, why do we even need to decide in the first place?