The Examination and Evaluation System
 

In cases where there are genuine efforts made by the well meaning government officials there is unfortunately no reciprocal encouragement from the parent, teacher community as; perceptions of what constitutes education is rather skewed. The do not realise that children get complacent not because there are no exams but because the   'education' doled out is dull and boring...

There were virtually no takers for the human resource develop-ment ministry's suggestion that all children be automatically promoted till class VIII. Nor did the proposal that answer scripts be returned to stu-dents by examination boards so as to introduce greater transparency into the public examination system, re-ceive an enthusiastic response.

The issue of examination reform figured prominently at the recent re-gional seminar on education, organi-sed by the ministry. Several other is-sues were also discussed. However, there was near unanimity on the re-jection of the two proposals thrown up by the ministry.

It is learnt that HRD minister Mad-havrao Scindia had been keen on pushing through the proposals, but they were resisted by the ministry of-ficials and the community of tea-chers, parents and students. The gen-eral view was that neither of theseproposals was feasible and would not serve the cause of education.

...Mr Scindia's contention was that detaining students and putting a stig-ma of "failure" on them at an early age does them incalculable psycho-logical harm and also contributes to the problem of drop-outs. The argument, however, cut little ice with the participants at the seminar.

B.B. Punj, principal, Government Girls Senior Secondary School;  "Children tend to lose interest in studies and become complacent when they know there is no exam or that the result of the exam has no bearing on their being promoted," she observed. She said the Delhi experiment where students were not detained till Class VI had proved this point. "By the time, the students reach class VII, we find that their fundamentals are weak," she said. This was more so in the case of government schools where the standard of education is lower.

 
The grades will be awarded to indicate the subject-wise perfor-mance of students in the examination. "The grades will be award-ed on a nine-point scale broadly based on percentiles without any reference to marks," said Mr Ganguly. Those who get nine out of nine points will be put in grade Al as "outstanding students" and under grade A2 will be those who get eight points, who will be branded as "excellent" students. Under grade Bl and B2 will include those who secure seven and eight points respectively. Their qualitative de-scription will be "very good" and "good" respectively.
Mr Ganguly said that the stu-dents who get five numerical grade value will be treated as "av-erage" and will be in Cl grade. Next to them will be "fair" under grade C2 with four points. The stu-dents who procure three points, will qualitatively be branded as "marginal" and will come under grade Dl. Those who get two points will be graded under D2 as "poor" students. And the rest with one point will be put in grade "E" as "very poor" students.

In this radical new proposal of "relative grading" which is expected to spark off yet another debate over the system of evalua-tion in schools, the CBSE has recom-mended that from 2002, it will assign grades in place of actual scores. And scores will be measured in relative, not absolute terms....

So Al in a subject means your score is in the top 4 per cent of the students in that subject and this will give you nine points.

A2 means you are in the top 4-7% and so and so on. The three lowest grades of Dl,D2 and E will be awarded to those who are in the bot-tom 23% of the pile.

Some academics argue that it's more suited when the playing field is more or less level. Not the CSBE system where there's a huge gap be-tween private schools and badly run government schools. For, this will force poor stu-dents who don't do well to drop out of the system. At pre-sent, in Delhi itself, 75,000 out of 1.5 lakh government school children fail. "If you're mak-ing it mandatory for 23 per cent of the students to fail, then the percentage of children failing in one subject or another is bound to increase.

Another fear is that unlike the SATs and the GREs, the new CBSE proposal has no provision of mentioning the actual marks obtained. "It will be difficult to challenge the evaluation process," says an academic.

...should not students be mark-ed on an absolute scale rather than on this vague system? Are grades relative? Relative to what? Since grading is not suitable for a selec-tion situation, how useful can it be in university/ school examination? Are not the procedures of scaling marks and translating them into grades rather too complex, too technical to be workable? Why should we insist on seven or nine categories, while the most com-monly used grading scale in educationally advanced countries (USA, UK, Sweden, Germany) comprises just five?

Indeed, there are several diffi-culties inherent in the system. To many educationists, grades appear very coarse; these are made an excuse to continue with a high deg-ree of subjectivity in judgment. There is a possibility of error in the grading scale. Employers and those who admit students for post-gra-duate study may find it impossible to choose one amongst many who obtained the same grade. The system does not make for ranking of candidates. It would be difficult to award medals, prizes, etc. As various appointing authorities want grades to be translated into at least percentages, the system adds to the work.

 

WHILE THE Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is trying to figure out an alterna-tive to the 9-point grading system, schoolteachers are not very sure of the impact. How will any new system of grading eliminate the arbitrariness and the element of error present in the external system of evaluation,teachers ask?

Teachers who evaluate board exam answer sheets point out errors, Mala Gupta of Spring-dales School, Dhaulakuan, says the marking scheme for Class XII biology paper had some "concep-tual  errors." As a result of which, she adds, students lost some 7-8 marks. In one of the questions, students were asked to draw an external view of the heart," she says, adding, "If students also indicated the various internal parts in the diagram of the exter-nal view, they were given a zero which is very unfair." In another instance cited as a "factual error" by many teachers is a question that asked the num-ber of hormones secreted by a particular gland in the female body "There is only one hormone that this gland secretes whereas the question asked for more than one hormones," says Gupta.

Every year, thousands of students get a compartment in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) when they fail in one or two subjects in the Class X and Class XII examinations. What irks the students is the callous-ness with which CBSE deals with these students. By the time the CBSE conducts the compart -mental examination it is too late for many of them. The class XII students placed in com-partment are the ones who suffer the most. By the time these examinations are conducted, the admission to various under-graduate courses in majority of universities is over.
The result: They can not get admission to reg-ular courses. As a last recourse they have to look towards the Schools of Open Learning or Correspondence Courses offered by different universities. Those who want to get into but on-ly regular courses have to wait for one whole year.
Neither the CBSE nor the government have found a way to save one year of the students who get a compartment.

 
Almost a decade after his Charwaha Vidyalaya programme flopped, Laloo Prasad Yadav plans to launch yet another reform in education to woo back-wards. Laloo's new scheme envisages examinations at the end of Class VIII in all government schools, in addition to the two existing school-leaving examinations. The middle-school examina-tion will not have any "fail sys-tem", said Ramchandra Purve, minister for parliamentary affairs and education. Students will be categorised under five grades de-pending on the marks obtained out of a total of 550 in the test. The lowest grade— fifth— will be awarded to those who get less than 30 per cent. The most ad-vanced —those getting 75 per cent or more — will be given awards to encourage others to do better. The weaker students will be given spe-cial attention which will equip them to handle the school-leaving examination at the end of Class X.
...Purve, a teacher and a member of the RJD thinktank, feels this as-sessment will help Dalit students who cannot afford expensive pri-vate tutorials or English-medium schools unlike their upper-caste counterparts.

Educationists also point out the existing system does not work and one more examination will only increase the burden. With a paucity of funds, they wonder how the system will function. "The charwaha scheme per-ished due to lack of adequate moti-vation.