A large number of my students want to discuss the marks they obtained in SSB. These are my views about the SSB marks:

• Marking is a complex process and there is no need for the candidates to assess the implications.
• It is adequate to know that the person has not been recommended. It would be sensible to try to analyze as to what improvements need to be made for future and that is all.

Knowing Marks and Analyzing Them May at Times be Harmful

I have one student who got recommended after he was under my training. He was the son of a Service officer and through some contact his father was able to find out his SSB marks in GTO. He learnt that his son had been assessed as having unacceptably poor “social adjustment” by the GTO.

I often know my students better than any assessor, for the following reasons:

• I have assessed them through the use of two techniques.
• They remain under my guidance for a reasonable period of time.

Coming back to this specific case I found that this boy was staying with his grand- parents and was taking very good care of them. He had a genial disposition and was very polite in conduct. A guy with, “Lucknawi tahzeeb, he got along very well with people. In my view considering him as poor in “social adjustment” was not just poor assessment but a joke. I told him as well as his father to forget about the wrong assessment made by the GTO.

I found out that during the GTO series in which the assessment had been done, there had been some altercation in the group caused by one or two candidates and the GTO had wrongly assessed him as a result. This knowledge of his being assessed as poor in a quality was bad for the student. Had he not known this assessment he would have been better off.

His subsequent selection proved that the past assessment was incorrect. We never made any efforts to improve his quality of “social adjustment” because he was rather good in this quality as it is.

Final Words

Please do not bother to find out the SSB marks or try to interpret or analyze them. It will be a waste of time. If you are my student and you are very keen to do the above things despite my advice, please do so but do not involve me in the exercise of interpretation of SSB marks.