Chandigarh not to hold preparatory exams for NAS 2024

The date for the exam was recently announced and has been fixed for December 4; the survey will cover almost five million students across 792 districts of the country

Even as other states have started gearing up for the National Achievement Survey (NAS) exam to be conducted in December 2024, officials of the UT education department have confirmed that they will not be conducting mock tests, as they are confident of repeating NAS 2021’s performance of topping among all UTs.

In 2021, Chandigarh had performed the best out of all the UTs while Punjab had performed best out of all the states. (HT File)

The date for the exam was recently announced and has been fixed for December 4. The survey will cover almost five million students across 792 districts of the country. This time, students will be from Classes 3, 6 and 9 while in 2021 they were from Classes 3, 5, 8 and 10.

NAS is a nationally representative large-scale survey of students’ learning undertaken by the Union ministry of education. NAS gives a system level reflection on effectiveness of school education. Findings help compare the performance across spectrum and across population in order to find the desirable direction for improvements.

While adjoining states like Punjab and Himachal Pradesh have already started taking mock tests to give their students a better shot, UT director school education Harsuhinderpal Singh Brar said the department is not planning to hold any last-minute preparatory exams. “We have been working throughout the past three years and we are confident we will score well. The teachers have been working with students throughout and we hope to once again get the best score among all the UTs this time,” he said.

In 2021, Chandigarh had performed the best out of all the UTs while Punjab had performed best out of all the states. While overall rankings weren’t released in NAS 2021 which had faced a one-year delay due to Covid, individual scores for each class and for each subject were released and Chandigarh had done the best in all subjects out of the UTs except for EVS in Classes 3 and 5 in which Chandigarh came second.

The scores were also a bit lower than NAS 2017. However, then UT education secretary Purva Garg had attributed this to Covid and the switch to online classes. The report found that 98% of students of Class 8 had faced obstacles while learning.

NAS was held in November 2021 and about 5,726 students appeared for it from 106 schools in the city including 7 schools of the central government, 52 government schools, 7 government-aided schools and 40 private schools. It is held every three years.