Interesting :
National Assessment Centre Parakh (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), an independent body of NCERT, recently submitted an “equivalence” report to the education ministry.
This report, which goes into the diversity of the various Indian boards, will act as a “starting point to facilitate the creation of an initial set of draft standards for equivalence”.
“Equivalence is not uniformity,” clarified Indrani Bhaduri, CEO and head of Parakh.
“The genesis of this first-of-a-kind study was to understand where boards are and what standards are to be attained in terms of administration, curricula, infrastructure, inclusiveness, and assessment.”
An important recommendation of the report concerns assessment.
It says that a student’s performance in classes 9, 10, and 11 will be added to the final score for class 12. The class 12 result will thus be cumulative with 15% weight for the class 9 score, 20% for class 10, 25% for class 11, and 40% for class 12.
Several state boards are older than national boards — ICSE, CBSE, NIOS. Many state boards, like Uttar Pradesh’s, were established long before India’s independence in 1947.
State boards design their own curricula, train their own teachers, and set their own assessment patterns and rules.
Why Did Parakh Look At The Various Boards?
“We all know there is huge variability between the various boards. Parents take their children out of state boards and shift them to CBSE. Why is this happening?” asked Bhaduri. The Parakh panel noticed that there is a great deal of variation when a child switches boards.
“If the boards are similar and comparable, that would make mobility easy. Also, if our boards are comparable, then why have CUET or NEET?
Can we do away with these exams?
That is the next question after we achieve some standardisation. Making the boards more relevant and making their results matter was also something that the Parakh team had in mind while drawing up its recommendations,” she said.
Are Our Boards Really Very Different From One Another?
“Variation across boards as regards content and assessment was apparent. But as for lower and higher-order thinking skills, the largest variation across boards was seen in English question papers and the greatest balance in maths. In science, very few questions across all boards address higher-order thinking skills.
Did The Study Look At Issue Of Inflation Of Final Scores?
The study shows that certain boards have a large proportion of short questions.
The study said most boards “emphasised” short and very short items in their paper.
“A disproportionate ratio of multiple choice, very short, short, and long questions were observed in many boards.”
In the case of class 12 exams, too, the report says:
“To increase the percentage of easy items while promoting holistic education, boards should provide opportunities for learners to learn higher-order skills and provide workshops and training to teachers to construct test items that are intended to be solved easily by learners who have learned the competencies while still maintaining the integrity of the assessment.”
What Are The Other Pointers?
The report said that assessments should be in terms of credits in each grade.
Students can earn credits for each subject and also for pursuing online courses and activities that are part of the holistic progress card.
This progress card should include the student’s self-evaluation on aspects like ‘time management’ and ‘plans after school’ along with the teacher’s assessment of the student in group project work and peer feedback.
The report recognises the importance of state boards and covers where they stand and how they can journey towards excellence.
What Parakh looked at?
Close to 18,000 question papers were analysed.
This included :
# class 10 and 12 of 27 boards,
# 6 boards each of secondary and higher secondary, and
# 13 open boards.
# There were also 7 boards each of Sanskrit along with madrasa boards and 3 technical and vocational boards.
The ‘equivalence’ report sets standards for the boards across five categories — administration, curriculum, assessment, inclusiveness, and infrastructure.
Officials said the idea behind pursuing equivalence is not to establish “uniformity” across boards but to ensure that “every learner who enrols under any board should get certain standardised, benchmarked facilities for performance”.
It also aims at “easy mobility between boards”.
Is Tripura really the toughest state board?
“That is a completely wrong inference drawn by several media outlets. It was just cited as an example in one assessment parameter. In fact, we tried to not mention any boards as we did not want conversation around the fact that one board is easy, another tough,” said Indrani Bhaduri, the CEO and head of Parakh.
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