Promotion likely for class 1-8 students sans exams

LUCKNOW: The UP basic education department may promote students of classes one to eight of all government primary and upper primary schools in the state to next level without conducting exams in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Over 15.8 million students are enrolled in nearly 1.59 lakh government primary and upper primary schools across Uttar Pradesh.

“We have not taken any final decision yet. Definitely it is one of the options to promote all students without exams. We don’t have much choices as schools remained closed throughout the year. The decision will be taken after discussions with chief minister Yogi Adityanath and senior officials of the department. The state government will soon hold a meeting to take the final decision,” said UP basic education minister Satish Chandra Dwivedi. Officials in the department have been discussing the issue for some time now. If it happens, it will be for the second consecutive year that students of government schools will be promoted without exams.

Last year in March, basic education department had cancelled its proposed annual examinations scheduled to be held between March 23 and 28 after the outbreak of Covid-19 and all students from class 1 to 8 were promoted to the next level without examination.

“With winter and corona still here, the state government may not order reopening of government schools up to class 8. Under these circumstances, the only option left with the department is to promote all students because declaring zero academic session will have an adverse impact lives of millions of students,” an official said.

“The government is ready with a plan wherein when government decides to reopen schools, the teachers will carry out a special drive of 100 days to facilitate students to overcome learning deficit as classroom teaching remained disrupted. Although teachers carried out online teaching but in want of mobile phones and other resources, a lot many students missed out on their lessons and remained completely cut off from teaching-learning exercise,” an official said.

The department will soon prepare a pool of master trainers who will train the teachers as how to help students overcome their learning deficit. As soon as schools reopen, the drive will be launched to improve the learning capacity of students for which modules will be developed and integrated in Diksha portal of the education ministry.