With no final exams, the Central Board of Secondary Examination (CBSE) will be taking into account the class 10, 11 final marks, and the class 12 internals to calculate results for the high-stake 12th board exams. Experts are still debating whether judging a students’ scores based on the previous years’ score a sign of good evaluation? Are internals and practicals enough to make the report cards? In an education system that relies heavily on one final exam to judge the students, the new evaluation process has brought forth loopholes in the marking scheme in general.
‘Students were not prepared for this’
The education system has been designed in a way that it pays attention fully to the last exam but that reduces attention to the learning process, says Dr Sunita Singh, associate professor, Ambedkar University Delhi. “We have not prepared the students to mark them in this mode of evaluation. They were not prepared for this…The process used by CBSE is a much better strategy but only if it is done on a regular basis,” adds Singh.
Dr Coomi Vevaina, founder-director of the Centre for Connection Education and Management and former professor at Mumbai University agrees with Singh. She says that the major problem with new evaluation takes into summative assessment rather than formative. “If we had a regular assessment process that would judge students piece by piece, that would be better.”
‘Be Careful of Eradicating Bias’
“The new approach proposed by CBSE offers a new way to think about internal testing models, however, it requires extra caution and extra accommodation for error and bias because teaching and assessment both are impacted by teachers’ capacity, competency, and bias,” says Dr Shweta Singh, career and education coach, and academic.
If this evaluation criterion continues and students are prepared from beforehand, it “will help mitigate the role of the school in some way” in the child’s education. It would be more beneficial. Mostly, the preparation of students happens at home prior to the board exams. They just mug up. “This way students will pay more attention to learning the subjects part by part. They will give engage with basic concepts for a longer duration and will understand the concepts deeply enabling them to retain the knowledge in the long run,” says Dr Sunita Singh.
Bright students at a disadvantage
Armaan Choudhary, a student of class 12 (2020-21), Seth Anandram Jaipuria School, Vasundhara, Ghaziabad says, “Students who attained highest scores on average in last three years would finish as top scorers in class 12 and the same principle would be applied to medium and low scorers.”
Physical exams are ideally not for every student and should be utilized by those students who had an extremely poor academic performance in the last few years, says Armaan. CBSE is allowing students who are unhappy with score to appear for special exam at a later stage.
On the other, Arunabh Singh says the only children that may be disadvantaged would be the super-bright children who are studying in schools that are performing below average in school results. “If a school has 100 children and most of the students have an average score of 70 per cent and only one child has got 99 per cent, that child will be at a disadvantage. This time, since the schools have to prepare their own results and considering the upper bar is their previous year’s school results, chances are those marks will get distributed more than to give marks to that one child since the schools will have to balance on the averages. A child who is an absolutely hardworking person will be at a disadvantage,” explains Singh.
Better for students without access to online classes
Not everyone is against the boards’ decision. Many children had no access to online classes, hence those schools will not have data to feed for their internal marking. “They had no classes, no results, a precarious situation that schools find themselves in. They have tried to bind it with internals, pre-boards and practicals, through this process they will get closest to the actual situation of the child,” says Arunabh Singh, Director, Nehru World School.
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