Reforming Assessment - Time for Change

The recent CBSE paper leak presents an occasion to consider wide-ranging reforms in the process by which we assess student learning in our schools to make it more pedagogically appropriate, less stressful, and relevant to modern society. At a time when public discourse on education commonly references 21^st century skills, a Board examination that only emphasises rote learning and the ability to memorise and reproduce facts is an anachronism that has outlived its utility.

The purpose of assessment should be to illuminate where a learner is on her path of learning at a given point in time. This implies that learning is a continuous, ongoing process that does not end at a particular stage, in keeping with the internationally accepted principles of lifelong learning. Equally importantly, the assessment of learning should lead to an understanding of a student’s ability to construct and apply learnt knowledge as opposed to her ability to memorise factual information that will not be retained after the examination.

A conscious move away from the current situation was made when the Right to Education Bill, 2005, was drafted on the basis of recommendations of a sub-committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE). While recommending the removal of all Board examinations at grade 8 level and a no-detention policy, the sub-committee also recommended the introduction of Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) to ensure that learning was assessed regularly through the school year in order to track student progress. This came from the belief that labelling children examination failures at such a young age was harmful to their self-esteem and their ability to stay engaged with learning. The sub-committee recognised that the majority of children in the schooling system come from less privileged backgrounds, many of them being first generation school-goers, and failing them would have the immediate consequence of pushing them out of school.

As the then Director in the Ministry of HRD who assisted the sub-committee and worked on the draft, I can vouch for the fact that CCE at the elementary stage (grades 1 through 8) was expected to be driven by NCERT and customised by states based on their own specific requirements. It was never envisaged that CBSE, a Board of secondary education, would be responsible for its design and implementation, as eventually happened. The manner in which CCE was implemented carried within itself the seeds of its own downfall, increasing pressure on teachers and establishing a complicated assessment system that was never fully understood by those most affected by it.

Assessment of children’s learning should be an in-built mechanism, with teachers undertaking regular, ongoing monitoring of what has been learnt by the individual child so that corrective action can be taken in time – in other words, assessment for learning. This is of course, easier said than done, given the conditions under which many teachers function, especially in government schools, with multi-grade classrooms, and pupil-teacher ratios in excess of 100:1 in many states. Yet a portfolio containing work done by each child over a period of time remains the best indicator of student progress and can help to scaffold and support individual learning.

This in-classroom assessment should be accompanied by diagnostic, low-stakes, external assessments to indicate the health of the education system. The results of such assessments, such as the National Achievement Survey (NAS) recently carried out by NCERT, provide policy makers with clear information about the functioning of the system and help to identify shortcomings for correction. After the poor showing of Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009, India has stayed away from international learning assessments like PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, but there has been some discussion lately around the possibility of participation in PISA 2021. In such a situation, undertaking national diagnostic assessments that provide comparative data over time and across regions acquires renewed importance.

Using Board examination results for selection to higher education institutions has become an annual farce, with students scoring unrealistically high marks, pushing up the cut off levels each year. Eliminating the Board examination altogether and replacing it with an individual entrance test or a standardised assessment like an indigenously developed GRE- or GMAT-like test would remove stress and provide a reliable mechanism for selection. Combined with a portfolio describing a student’s progress over the years, this would provide a far more accurate picture of abilities than the current Board results.

With the establishment of the new National Testing Agency announced in the last Budget, there is an historic opportunity to initiate far-reaching reforms in the way in which we assess student learning, and to drag our education system into the 21^st century. It is unfortunate that the committee set up to review the CBSE leak has its mandate confined to the leaks only, instead of focusing on the big picture. The earlier experiment of CCE may not have been fully successful, but that should not deter us from putting in place more carefully designed assessment systems that help all stakeholders, and most of all, our children.