School education and the examination system

摘要

There is a good deal of discussion about secondary and higher secondary education and the examination system these days. The drawbacks of the extreme importance given to marks in the examinations are there for all to see. Everyone, right from the HRD Minister, bigwigs in NCERT and other central and state institutions, is talking about these maladies and suggesting solutions. Before accepting a new alternative, there must be some foresight about the picture that may emerge in two or three years if a certain innovation is carried out, lest there is a fiasco and we are faced with a chaotic situation. One of the alternative proposals that is making rounds is to scrap the examinations up to the ninth standard, and to give grades instead of marks at Class X. For further education, it is proposed in this model, that there will be appropriate entrance examinations everywhere, after Class X and Class XII. It is felt that there are many pitfalls in this alternative and perhaps not enough thought has gone into it. Here I wish to propose a different model, more for the structure of Class X and Class XII education, than for examinations per se. It will have definite advantages and will not require much financial inputs. The alternative is in fact not new in the sense that it has been followed in the developed countries and some other parts of the world for quite some time now. Before elaborating on it, let me first briefly go through the present system.