Deconstructing the boards

“We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.”

 - Ivan Illich[i]

Late last month, both CBSE[ii] and CISCE[iii] declared that they were cancelling all remaining board examinations for classes 10 and 12 due in 2020. While in some cases students had sat for all their examinations, in many others they had been able to take only a few and the rest were yet to be held. Given the current pandemic, it is clear that organising the remaining examinations in the usual manner will be difficult in the foreseeable future.

Both boards have therefore worked out a via media whereby the average scores of examinations already completed or internal assessments (or both) will form the basis for scores in the remaining examinations. Since not everyone may find this a satisfactory solution, they’ve also proposed that a regular examination will be conducted when feasible, to enable students to improve their performance as calculated by these average scores.

Over the years, the conduct of the board examinations, declaration of their results, celebrating the toppers, and commiserating with those who haven’t done as well has become a regular routine. Each year there are inspiring stories of those who worked hard and did exceptionally well, and each year there are the tragic reports of children who took their own lives because the pressure became too much. Each year there is a resolve to do better next time, to improve the system and bring about meaningful change, and each year there is more chaos, heartbreak, and frustration, not just for the students, but also for the teachers, parents, and schools.

When Illich wrote Deschooling Society[iv] in 1971, he spoke of the need to invert the education funnel that channelled students into particular directions, imagining instead an inverted funnel that created an opportunity for a web of learning connections. This vision of education is one that we seem to have lost in our slavish adherence to the annual board examination rituals. In the process, we have ended up limiting ourselves, proving his view that “so persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities”[v]. Surely there should be more to education than this? How then might we ‘invert the funnel’? What can we do to simplify the current system instead of complicating it further?

The age-based system of school classrooms has its origins in the 19^th century, when for various reasons it became acceptable to organise students in a school on this basis. The underlying assumption here is that all students have similar levels of learning and learn at more or less the same pace. But the truth, as anyone who has been in a classroom can tell you, is that there are wide variations between pupils, with the top ten percent of the class often being up to four or even five grade levels ahead of the lowest ten percent. To assume therefore, that a student is ready to take a board examination merely because she’s reached the age of 16 or 18 years and is in class 10 or 12 may not necessarily be appropriate.

Equally, the assumption that every student must have an equal interest in every subject is false; some students enjoy mathematics, others history or psychology or music – why then must we prescribe that there must be mandatory subject groups for such examinations? Why not allow students to study only the subjects that interest them?

An unintended side effect of the cancellations wrought by the pandemic has been to demonstrate yet again that the present system of board examinations actually has little or no relevance in today’s world. If a student’s performance can be assessed on the basis of internal assessments as will be done in several cases now, why can this not be the norm instead of the exception? Why can’t each individual school monitor student progress through the grades and award a certification of completion of class 10 or 12 based on that performance?

The challenge, some will say, would lie in ensuring standardisation – how would we be able to compare the assessment prepared by one school with another in order to decide which student was the more meritorious? How would colleges and universities select students based on merit if they couldn’t compare between assessments from different schools? The simplest way to do that would be for individual colleges and universities to have their own entrance examinations for admission, as indeed some already do. Any student who has received a certificate of completion of class 10 or 12 from their school would be eligible to sit such an entrance test, and based on their performance on the test would be eligible for admission. But since not every college or university has the means to conduct such examinations, how else might we simplify the present system?

A possible way of doing that would be to restructure the current annual board examinations into on-demand subject certification examinations. In other words, when a student feels she’s ready, she can register for and take a standardised examination conducted by the boards that would certify her level of performance in a particular subject. This would allow the boards to offer competency-based assessments in each subject, with students opting to take only those assessments that they require. And it would allow students to opt for such certification when they feel ready, not when they reach a certain age or class.

In Australia for instance, a student in class 10 can opt to take advanced classes and do class 11 maths or physics say, and then take the class 12 certification exam when they feel they are ready. The same is the case with the GCSE A levels, where students can choose to do one, two, or more examinations when they are ready. A system of on-demand certification could allow advanced students to stretch themselves by doing higher level subjects if they so chose, while others could seek such certification at their own pace. The flexibility of such a system would allow the boards to address the needs of different types of students at different points in time.

A structure like this would also mean that those who choose to avoid any end-of-cycle examination could do so without pressure or stigma, thus reducing the motivation for some to drop out of school altogether. Many students wish to move into vocational training or the job market at the end of class 12 instead of continuing with higher education – armed with their class 10 or 12 completion certificate from the school, they could take the entrance examinations for vocational courses without needing to complete a board examination of the type offered today. Essentially this would create multiple pathways to exit school after class 10 or 12, allowing students the freedom of choice to pursue subjects of interest in the appropriate setting.

Changes of this nature would require the boards themselves to change, to put in place systems and technologies that would let them offer such on-demand assessments. They would need to develop the capacity for conducting standardised, competency-based assessments, as well as the ability to undertake psychometric analysis to enable comparisons. They would need to create a question bank with items of comparable difficulty, covering various aspects of the curriculum so that students are assessed fairly and equitably, no matter which assessment they take. Most of all, they will need to establish that each assessment provides valid and reliable data from which appropriate conclusions may be drawn. The good news is that none of these changes are particularly difficult, and with India’s participation in PISA 2022[vi], many of these capabilities are already being considered or created.

Instead of complicating education for the learner, we need to simplify it, making the experience as stress-free and enjoyable as possible for those going through the process, supporting the creation of a thirst for lifelong learning. Providing multiple pathways to exit the school system after class 10 or 12, deconstructing the current board examinations and replacing them with a more flexible assessment system would be important first steps in that process.

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[i] Illich, I. (1969, November 6). Outwitting the “Developed” Countries. The New York Review of Books.

[ii] Central Board of Secondary Education, www.cbse.nic.in.

[iii] Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, www.cisce.org.

[iv] Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York: Harper & Row.

[v] Illich, I. (1969). op cit.

[vi] Previously 2021, now deferred by a year.

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.