Standards and their advantages

1. Mankind has achieved so much in the past few centuries and the rate of
development continues to grow today. In the last century alone, through
innovations, heaps of imagination and hard work, some of the world’s most
important inventions were able to see the light of day. These inventions such as
the telephone, continue to be reshaped and presented to us in different ways.
The development we see today would not have been possible, without the people
involved, following a code or set of guidelines or principles to help them to
monitor their progress. These principles and guidelines are what we call
standards. Standards allow us to compare our work with that of another, judge
the impact of different events and someone’s actions and inventions, allow us to
be competitive in a world where uniqueness is a rarity and most importantly
standards breed efficiency by helping us attain better results and reducing the
wastage of our knowledge and abilities.
Standards allow people who are working towards the same goals to compare and
contrast their progress with each other and therefore allow them to produce
better results. When Apple Inc. unveiled the first iphone to the public in 2007,
the concept of a phone that could multitask, i.e. a smartphone, was largely just
that, a concept, for cellphone users and even mobile developers across the world.
The Iphone, although, was not the first smartphone, it was the first of its kind to
be made available across the globe. It wasn’t long before other companies, who
were essentially working on the same ideas and concepts, presented their own
versions of the Iphone. Nokia brought the Nokia 5800, Samsung the Galaxy S and
Sony Ericsson the Xperia X 2. Iphone became the standard for smartphone
developers who compared and contrasted their work with that of Apple Inc.’s
and strived to build a better smartphone both in terms of price and quality. Apple
Inc. itself has learned from its competitors in improving the design of the Iphone
e.g. HTC’s economical and innovative use of materials such as aluminum in the
construction of its smartphones has served as an inspiration for Apple to bring
down the manufacturing cost of the Iphone which, in its 5th
generation, remains
the most expensive smartphone on the market.
Standards allow us to judge the impact of different events on the world around
us. The biggest natural disaster of its kind, the 2004 tsunami, led to the deaths of

2. 230,000 people and destroyed whole communities in South East Asia. It has been
termed as one of the worst natural disasters in modern history and has become
the benchmark to which every other similar incident is compared e.g. the tsunami
off the coast of Japan in 2011 caused less deaths and destruction over a relatively
small area and therefore pales in terms of impact to the 2004 tsunami. The 2004
tsunami has been used as the yard stick for the development of safety measures
against tsunamis and has allowed countries to focus their efforts to provide better
and economical protection for their people against natural disasters.
In universities and schools today, every student strives to be outstanding in his or
her fields of study. The universities and schools compare the academic
capabilities of the students against standards that have been set up by them in
conjunction with other universities and schools and Education Ministries. If no
standards existed, the talent and abilities of the students would be wasted as the
students wouldn’t have any idea of how they are supposed to perform
academically and what is required of them. For instance, the Pakistan Engineering
Council requires a civil engineering undergraduate to complete 139 credit hours
worth of courses in order to be registered as a world class civil engineer. If a civil
engineering student A passed courses that amounted to more than the 139
required credit hours, A would have essentially wasted his or her time and energy
to be given the same status as another student B who completed his
Undergraduate studies with no less than 139 credit hours. Also it is more likely
that the quality of A’s work as an engineer would be lower than that of B’s, since
A divided his or her attention between more courses than B. The gist of this
example is that standards reduce wastage and can allow you to produce better
results with a greater focus on quality than quantity.
Standards provide efficiency to every type of system. It’s hard to imagine a world
without standards. A world without standards is one where people have nothing
to aim for, where people have no way of differentiating their work in a particular
field with that of the others in the same field and the spirit of competition is non-
existent. A world without standards is a world where there is no line between
extraordinary and ordinary and there is no way to determine the rate of
development, let alone a way of identifying development.