Shifting away from exam-based education

They say that there's nothing so bad that there's not some good in it. So very true! Even the ongoing pandemic of this magnitude has brought about a few permanent changes and a paradigm shift in some spheres. Mind you, all the changes are not for the worse, and though change is painful, yet it's needed.

The most affected area is education and the online mode of imparting education has engendered many grassroots changes. For example, CBSE recently announced a new evaluation method for Class X that takes into account the students' performance throughout the year. The new evaluation system earmarks 10 marks for unit tests, 30 for half-yearly and 40 marks for pre-board exams. The remaining 20 marks are for internal assessment. Since most of the exams, at all levels, have become farcical due to online education, an alternative to the age-old examination system has become imperative. Taking into account the year-long performance of the students is far more realistic than their evaluation through a three-hour rigmarole called ‘exam’.

This pattern is sure to shift our obsessive attention away from exam-oriented education. What the cunning Thomas Babington Macaulay introduced in his condescending Minute on Education in 1835 has been followed long enough slavishly and without any significant change.

Education must denote 'gradual qualitative ascension.' Where's the scope for that qualitative betterment in our education system, which puts a premium only on exams and marks? A student may be very good at studies, but he/she may not have done well in the exams due to a number of factors. Will that student have to live till the wrinkled eve of his/her life with the scar and trauma of not faring well in the exams on a particular day?

Here comes the year-long assessment system that monitors a student's academic progress through the watchful process of steady evaluation.

The problem with the existing exam-oriented education is that it doesn't take into consideration a student's Evolutionary Learning Progress (ELP). It goes into assessment, not evaluation. And the difference between 'evaluation' and 'assessment' is that while the former is holistic, the latter is aspectual or facet-based. Exams cannot evaluate students. They can assess their 'skills' in parroting and rote-learning. On the other hand, evaluation is concerned with the academic evolution of a student or a learner.

Now, at this moment, when online education seems to be the only viable alternative to conventional classroom education, exams are all the more farcical because students need to submit answers online, and who's helping them and how cannot be known. In such testing circumstances, and without proper invigilation, the only way true evaluation can be of a participant's (read student’s) active involvement in the learning process over a span of time.

Agreed, exams are also required, but then they can serve as parallel, complementary processes, along with a student's overall performance over the months and years. This system is prevalent in most of the advanced countries. Quite a few European countries have completely dispensed with exams, and even those that still retain them have also resorted to some form of alternatives like year-long assessment and evaluation.

Thanks to the pandemic and the absence of conventional classroom education, new methods of academic evaluation must be conceptualised and created. Quarterly grading system sans exams must be introduced in the Indian education system. Most of the countries are changing over to this following the pandemic, which has stalled and stymied education across the globe.

The assignment-based year-long performance of students is being accepted in India and the importance of exams is slowly waning. The atavistic fear of exams may be the undoing of many students because in the words of Charles Caleb Colton, “Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer!”

We should hope that the year-long involvement and participation of young students will soon be the new academic norm in India rather than exams as litmus tests to assess their intelligence. The orthodoxy and ossification of education with an abnormal emphasis on marks must be stopped for the evolution of young minds. Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, Covid-19 will also fade away and things will slowly get back to pre-pandemic days. Even when education reverts to the classroom mode, all these positive changes, like sustained evaluation, assignment-orientation and classroom participation must be continued with no let-up. That'll create lively and ebullient students, not the academic zombies we get to see and mistake for brilliance and erudition.

(The writer is a scholar of Sanskrit and Semitic languages, civilizations and literature.)