Centre flags variations in education boards’ assessments

There were as many as 60 educational boards in 2021-22, according to the education ministry’s study released on Tuesday

Diverse syllabi and assessment criteria in Class 10 and Class 12 across the many education boards in the country -- the state boards, CBSE, ICSE, IB -- results in an uneven playing field for students appearing for competitive tests at the national level, a study by the central government has found.

Diverse syllabi and assessment criteria in Class 10 and Class 12 across the many education boards in the country results in an uneven playing field for students, said a study. (ANI i)

There were as many as 60 educational boards in 2021-22, according to the education ministry’s study released on Tuesday. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommended that there should be uniform benchmarks for learners across all school boards, which lead to the establishment of a national regulator PARAKH, short for Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development.

The study was part of an exercise to enable PARAKH to set norms, standards and guidelines for student assessment and evaluation for all recognised school boards in the country. To be sure, education is a state subject, and not all states have even adopted NEP 2020.

To be sure, it isn’t clear how PARAKH’s objectives are related to two results of the study highlighted by the ministry, widely differing pass percentages across boards and the proportion of students opting for certain streams. While indicative of an easier syllabi and generous scoring, a higher pass percentage in a certain board may also be a result of more proficient students. Indeed, even a casual perusal of the Annual State of Education Report (or ASER), which looks at learning outcomes, shows that proficiency varies widely across states.

Nor is preference for a certain stream -- the study found that the proportion of students opting for science is higher in Andhra Pradesh ( 76%), Telangana (65%), and Tamila Nadu ( 62%) and considerably lower in Punjab(13%), Haryana (15%), and Assam (17%) -- indicative of anything other than the preference for STEM specialisation in the southern part of the country, a decades-long preference that, in fact, powered India’s IT boom in the 1990s.

But the study’s findings on the difficulties in moving across boards, and the lack of a level playing field for competitive exams are valid (although the existence of competitive exams for admission to just about any college education means board exams are pretty much redundant). “Each Board follows its own standard, syllabus and time lines for exams and results. There is no level playing field for students in terms of standard and movement across the boards,” the central assessment found. “Different Syllabus followed by different boards creates barriers for national level common tests such as CUET, JEE, NEET etc. as compared to Central Board students,” it added.

CUET is a common entrance test for studying in central universities, JEE for engineering courses and NEET for medicine. The ministry has suggested that state boards should converge science syllabi with the central boards so that students have a level playing field for common entrance exams at the national level. To be sure, some people have pointed to the slipping standards even in so-called central boards, especially in science and math, with some state boards actually doing better.

“One cannot compare the results of different state boards when we know that the learning levels among students of these boards are very different. The government should first work on bringing the learning outcomes at par,” a former governing body member of the Central Board of Secondary Education said, declining to be named.

“To come up with a standard assessment under PARAKH, the fastest path is to use data from CUET (Common University Entrance Test) and create an index of comparison between the various boards based on the performance of a statistically significant number of students who have taken both the board exams and the CUET within the same year for the same subjects,” said educationist Meeta Sengupta. “This can form the basis of a more formal exercise and other instruments of comparison and aligning board standards.”

The study also said that eight states have different boards for class 10 and 12 that show large deviation in performance of students between . “This might be due to a different pattern and approach followed by the boards.Therefore convergence of secondary and higher secondary boards into a single board in a state can help students,” it added.