Exam fever

For the lakhs of students appearing for the ‘board’ exams, the leak of the Class X Mathematics paper and the Class XII Economics paper has been acutely disorienting. While it is laudable that no time has been lost in tracking down the ringleaders, it is important to nail administrative culpability and, more so, address process and policy failures. It is, for instance, baffling that the CBSE prepared just a single set of question papers, against the usual practice of keeping two or three sets ready. This could have contained the impact of a leak, more so in the age of Whatsapp. It is important that a government so intent on promoting digitisation learns a lesson or two from the manner in which global tests such as GMAT, GRE and SAT are conducted without any leaks whatsoever. While our current levels of internet penetration do not permit a replication of this model on a large scale in the case of board exams, surely a beginning can be made given our software expertise. It is noteworthy that the Digital India portal makes no mention of education, the focus being entirely on delivery of government services and an overhaul of financial transactions, besides ‘IT for jobs’, ‘information for all’ and ‘mobile connectivity’. Likewise, the New Education Policy, 2016, delves more into IT as a subject to be taught than the use of digital tools to enhance the reach, effectiveness and quality of education. Bharat Net holds the key to this endeavour. The education bureaucracy has remained impervious to e-governance which has improved public services in a range of areas.

However, the best systems can fail, if the incentives to cheat are strong. Board exams should be divested of their ‘do or die’ quality. In fact, it isn’t clear why the Class X ‘boards’ have been made compulsory again, if the student is to continue in the same school. The school-leaving exam should be merely treated as a qualifying criterion for college admission, with a national level entrance exam being conducted for various courses as in the case of admission to medicine and engineering. The board exam should cease to be one that eliminates students. That ever rising numbers appear for these exams each year — it was 28 lakh this time — also shows that online learning courses aren’t a draw. Whether the job market still prefers degrees from brick and mortar institutes of whatever quality is a moot issue.

The budgetary outlay on education must be doubled from present levels of 3.5 per cent of GDP so that both brick and mortar institutions as well as digital instruction get a boost. We need better educators to cope with today’s knowledge and pedagogical realities. The fetish to crack exams stems from deeper social biases that valorise white collar jobs over others. Education has failed to create value for skilled physical work. The task before policy-makers goes beyond plugging exam leaks to fixing an absurdly broken system.

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