Cracking the test

Schools should focus on learning, not examinations

Each year, “results season” for the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the largest all-India schools exam, grabs newspaper headlines for the progressively stratospheric nature of the grades. This year conformed to that trend. An amazing number of students have scored in the high nineties, or even maxed their papers. This year, for instance, the all-India pass percentage for the Class X was 92.5 with regions such as Thiruvananthapuram recording an astonishing 99.85 (Chennai and Ajmer were but decimal points behind). For Class XII, the total pass percentage appeared saner only by comparison at 83.4 per cent, with Thiruvananthapuram leading the charge again with an average of 98.2 per cent. The two joint toppers scored 499 marks out of 500.

These numbers are at once awe-inspiring and thought-provoking. Such high marks appear more conducive to the pure sciences and math, but humanities’ students scoring up to 99 per cent or even 100 per cent in papers such as English and history strongly suggests the use of the percentile marking system. Teachers would be the first to acknowledge that these progressively high grades do not necessarily point to an exponential rise in the level of academic brilliance of Indian children. In a country where white-collar jobs tend to be scarce, school and university exam results remain the principal means of determining quality. Over the years, this chronic problem has had a detrimental impact on the education system in which exams become an end in themselves rather than a way of testing a student’s intellectual capabilities.

This has created three problems. First, it has fostered an uber-competitive system that encourages parents to place immense pressure on students - India is unique in the number of student suicides for this reason alone. Second, the exam-oriented system downgrades a student’s analytical ability in favour of rote learning. Third, an exclusive focus on exam-cracking techniques that schools are all too willing to encourage to show good academic results. Even more deleteriously, the examination system itself has played along, so much so that an answer may be flat-out poor but the student scores high marks if she has recorded the right “keywords”. How do they know these keywords? Because the system itself offers rote-books that list every possible question and model answer, skewing the system in favour of students with the most retentive memory rather than capability for independent thought. The “keyword” approach has also caused a deterioration in syllabus design. For instance, “humanities” subjects tend to be lumped into one paper with the result that students learn little of such critical subjects as the Indian Constitution. Many young people buy into the majoritarianism of current political thinking because they are unaware of the founding principles of the Indian Republic, subjects once routinely taught in school until the eighties.

The principal sufferer at the other end of the education chain is the Indian employer. Reputed colleges set impossibly high cut-offs and decline to hold entrance exams to test students more meaningfully (one reason students graduating from reputed B-schools and engineering colleges are in demand is that entrance tests act as a sifting process). The same high-scoring student with untested analytical abilities then emerges into the working world singularly unarmed for the challenges it poses. Small wonder that the 2018 edition of the India Skills Report says that less than half of Indian graduates are employable. Whether in specialised skills or generalised ones, corporation after corporation reports the high cost of training graduates in basic knowledge (including language). That is why, instead of exulting at the results each year, India’s education establishment would do well to urgently address the deepening defects to which they paradoxically point.