Rethinking India’s Exam-Centric Education System

Context:

• This article is based on an Editorial “We need an education system that Isn’t held hostage by exams” which was published in the Live Mint. Board examinations are among the key problems of Indian education. Recently, the National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 (NCF) confronted this matter and suggested ways to overcome it.

What challenges do students often face during Board Examinations?

• Mental Pressure: Board exams in India cause huge stress for students and misguide education. 
  • For college admissions, India has too few quality colleges compared to demand. So entrance test competition is fierce causes extreme exam stress and drives harmful commercial coaching.
    • Coaching institutes increase stress to make money. 
• Career Determinant: Exam scores are seen as judging a student’s worth. Exam marks decide college admission and even future jobs. So students and families feel anxious if their performance is poor, even for just one day’s exam. 
• Memorization-Centric Assessment: Most board exams only test memorizing tons of facts. They fail to assess real learning, competencies, and curriculum goals.
  • These exams encourage teaching and textbooks to focus on memorization rather than learning and gaining competencies.
• Faulty Exam Designs: Results vary between evaluators and reliability is also poor.

Role of the new National Curriculum Framework on Solving this Issue: The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) has a comprehensive set of responses to address these challenges.

• Focus on Competency: Exams will test competencies actually stated in the curriculum – not just fact recall. Steps will ensure exam designers and evaluators are qualified. 
• Reduction of Syllabus Burden: Exam content load will be reduced.
• Dual Examination Opportunity: Students can take board exams twice a year and use their best scores. Later exams will be ‘on-demand’ – whenever the student is ready. 
  • This will cut stress as students won’t be judged just on one day’s performance.
• Common University Entrance Test (CUET): The National Education Policy has responses including a Common Entrance Exam. 
  • But the core solution is to vastly increase the number of good quality colleges in India. This will take sustained long-term efforts.

Conclusion:

India needs a fundamental shift – away from just an extreme exam system towards an actual education system focused on gaining competencies and learning and should change and improve examinations to enable real learning and make genuine assessments of it. The education-distorting marks chase must be done away with.

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