Unfinished CHAPTER From The Pandemic

The ‘real world’ was full of uncertainty, they were solemnly told, and that our planned affairs were often rearranged, pell mell, by quirks of chance. Those wise aphorisms were brought to bear on lakhs of Class 12 students who were looking forward to a less regimented adult life that a college so joyfully promises. With their scheduled examinations now postponed indefinitely, a veil of uncertainty has descended on their immediate future.

The batch of 2021 is at the mercy of an alarming crush of COVID-19 cases, something that the government thought had been rendered ine­ffectual enough not to plan for an alternative to the board examinations. As the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) cancelled examinations for Class 10 and postponed those for Class 12, nearly 24,000 affiliated schools were faced with a familiar brick-wall, blackened by a year’s dust. Having faced a similar situation last year, during the first Coronavirus wave, the expectation was of lessons learnt.

However, for nearly 15 lakh students of Class 12—that include 12.9 lakh from CBSE schools—the prospects are clouded by lack of clarity. Many have secured provisional admissions in private colleges and universities. Some have got admissions in universities abroad, but any further progression is subject to their Class 12 marksheet.

A popular resource group for mothers of senior school students on Facebook, ‘Senior School Moms’, exe­mplifies their problems: dates for ent­rance tests to universities and professional courses are uncertain; centres for SAT and IELTS are being juggled around; will foreign universities be flexible about accepting their marksheets late?

Founder of the 7,200-strong community, Anupama Jain rues the lack of foresight shown by the board and the government. While cancellation of Class 10 board tests may not have a very big impact, postponement of Class 12 exams has impacted students’ future. Jain says the board should have come up with a tangible online alternative after the pandemic messed up the examination schedule last year. Even this year, she says, the decision was taken after too much dithering. “While this decision to cancel is a big relief for Grade 10 students, the agony festers for Grade 12 children, with their future college adm­issions in limbo,” she says. She believes that while Indian colleges and universities may be accommodating, the same perhaps cannot be exp­ected from foreign ones.

The education ministry has already announced postponement of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), Main, which would delay admissions in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and other technical institutes, prompting them to fast-track the academic year.

“Students who have been granted admission in foreign universities may have problems, since they all expect results of Grade 12 exams by August. The students are scrambling to write to the universities, seeking guidance regarding the next steps, and hoping for deferred admissions,” says Jain. She wonders if the universities will show flexibility. “The IB (International Baccalaureate) schedule is calibrated as per that of the foreign universities. It is the CBSE students who will suffer the most,” says Jain.

However, former chairperson of the National Progressive Schools’ Conference and principal of Delhi’s Springdales School, Ameeta Mulla Wattal, is hopeful that universities will be accommodating. “Students across the world are facing cancellation and postponement of exams. Universities and colleges are going to support each other. Questions of children missing out on something will not arise, not even in India,” she tells Outlook.

The onset of a second, precipitous wave of the pandemic this year was to be expected. Armed with, and chastened by, last year’s experience, both the Centre and state governments had enough time to work out alternatives to meet the expected disruption in the education sector. But it rem­ained business as usual.

Principal of Suncity School, Gurgaon, Rupa Chakravarty, says that the Board should have worked on both short-term and long-term goals during the pandemic last year. “With some forward planning, the academic year could have been broken into smaller individualistic quarters, and if the situation kept on, they could have done a cumulative total for ass­essment,” she suggests. “There is this talk of semester-wise approach to board examinations with one year-end examination. It is a little premature and I cannot divulge too much at this point of time,” Chakravarty adds.

Following a semester system would make it easier to assess students without the big end-of-the-year exam. “Even schools like Suncity have a semester-wise system. If there is some hindrance, then sem­ester-wise, cumulative marks are the outcome. This is something everybody needs to think about, and needs to implement, especially the CBSE. I am on a few committees and I will again ask the CBSE to deliberate on it in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020,” she tells Outlook.

Wattal agrees that new forms of ass­essment are required. “Corona is not going anywhere; we have to find new ways of assessment, find creative rub­rics, and all these must start now. What have they (government) done in the past one year?” she asks.

Noted academician and former dir­ector of the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT), Krishna Kumar, wonders why the CBSE could not conduct class 12 board exam online this year when so many others were done online. For example, Delhi University conducted an online exam last year. “The CBSE, IGNOU and the NIOS (National Institute of Open School) have resources in every corner of the country. If these institutions decide to collaborate, a very credible exam can be taken online,” he says.

He suggests that students who do not have a laptop can be provided with one for the exam. The number of such students would not be very large, he surmises, because the CBSE overwhelmingly caters to private schools. “It’s not a big deal. We just don’t utilise the enormous resources we have.”

Kumar suggests that a certain proportion of marking can be done based on the assignments submitted by students to schools and the rest can be done based on the online board exam. “Let us say, 25 per cent of marking can be done based on assignments submitted by students and the rem­aining 75 on the basis of the online board exam. It can be a fairly accurate measure of the students’ work.”

Former secretary, school education and literacy, Anil Swarup, says that the government could have worked out a system of holding online exams but probably did not anticipate such a crippling second wave of the pandemic. While alternative ways of conducting exams were discussed last year too, nothing really came out of it.

“Elaborate discussions were held on whether technology can be used to conduct examinations in the same manner as is done for SAT, MAT and CAT—where you have an entire set of questions that are available and they get randomly picked up for students to answer. A similar sort of digital exa­mination could have happened for the CBSE students with proper planning. This can’t be done at a short not­ice of one month or two months. It requires a lot more preparation. The Board could have worked on this opt­ion,” suggests Swarup.

He says the CBSE, and maybe not the state boards, could have pulled it off, since affiliated schools would have the required infrastructure. Since the world may have to live with Coronavirus for some years to come, the CBSE will have to look at alternative ways of examining students, esp­ecially those in Class 12, to enable them to move on.

“These alternatives should have been thought of and implemented in the last one year, but no one had the time. All officers concerned were busy with the NEP because it was the only education-related thing that the PMO was monitoring. NEP gets you headlines but not how you conduct examinations. There is no Make in India lion shouting from rooftops to get headlines for the next day. If the government is busy chasing headlines, brass tacks like conducting exams do not count,” says Swarup.

The former bureaucrat believes it is time to bring other larger changes in the education system. According to him, the existing system of using Class 12 marks as qualification for adm­ission into a national university is “scandalous”.

“We give marks much more than what the child has actually got. You have students getting 100 out of 100 in English literature. How do you do that? I examined it at great length and wrote a paper on that. It is fraudulent,” Swarup says. He suggests that all the universities in the country can have a digital entrance exam where Class 12 marks won’t be that relevant.

This is something that finds resonance with several experts and educationists, including principal emerita of Lady Shri Ram College, Meenakshi Gopinath. She concurs that the past year provided an invaluable opportunity to rethink the whole process of evaluation, to come up with innovative responses, but that it was not utilised.

With so many students getting a 100 per cent, and the number going up each year, it will soon be unsustainable. “The numbers are so dizzying. At the university level, the numbers are so large that we are not using a system of admission but of rejection. So there inevitably will have to be a different criteria for college admissions—a more thought-through, a more personalised one,” explains Gopinath.

With the fate of Class 12 exams still uncertain, she says, it’s a golden opportunity for the colleges to come up with their own criteria for selection based on the kind of students they want and the institution they want to build. “These should all be determined by the college. All colleges cannot be all things to all people,” she says.

In fact, Gopinath, also the chair at Centre for Policy Research, suggests that time has perhaps come for going beyond the board examinations. “I personally am not in favour of these overarching board exams, the basis of which is that they will be more objective. Given the large disparities in our country—of class, region, lack of equity and access—ass­essment has to be much more school specific,” she says.

“It is one thing to talk about student-centric education, but at the end of it you evaluate them on the basis of a huge rubric that is so standardised and so unimaginative. That is why we are seeing such a huge exodus of our students going overseas for higher education. This entire board final exams system needs complete revisiting,” Gopinath tells Outlook.

A senior official of the CBSE concedes that there is a need to work out an alternate method for assessment in future, but still prefers a more traditional approach. “Online examination is not the answer. You can only assess the knowledge of a student with the online exam. Secondary school exams are meant to assess holistic progress of students, not just knowledge,” he says.

The Board has been holding consultations with the principals of schools to formulate objective criteria for the assessment of class 10 students. It is likely to come up with a circular in this regard before April-end. About Class 12, he says, offline exams need to be held, even if they take place as late as August-September. “There is no other alternative as of now,” he adds.