A LITMUS TEST

For some time now, I have been saying—albeit in jest—that perhaps the day is not far when India, viewed from outer space, would appear as one big examination centre. I am compelled to proclaim so by the fact that we as a nation seem to be intent on inflicting one national examination after another on our long-suffering student community. The malaise has afflicted India for decades, and is getting more and more pronounced with time. The Central University Entrance Test (CUET) is just the latest addition to the rather long list of nationwide exams. Perhaps the time has come for a thorough review of the need to put students through this ordeal as a means of enabling their pursuit of meaningful education and careers—and to judge the modes of assessment.

What has compelled us as a nation to foist another crucial exam on college aspirants? Of course, the clear and wellintentioned prescription of the National Education Policy (NEP) called for such an examination. This recommendation, in turn, was offered as a means to curb the burgeoning problem of highly inflated examination scores awarded by various school-leaving examination bodies in different parts of the country. Such scores had lost all meaning and universities were largely left to their own devices for admitting students—and those yardsticks were often equally unsatisfactory. The sky-high cutoffs for admissions at Delhi University colleges, for one, were a function of those unreal school scores.

The CUET is, in principle, a welcome policy recommendation incorporated in the encouraging and enlightened pages of the NEP. It was meant to make things easier and more enabling for school-leaving students. Though these are early days, it seems like we are off to a shaky start—with students again bearing the brunt of technical glitches and scheduling nightmares. Perhaps we should have spent a little more thought on designing the practical aspects of CUET. The rapid degeneration of national-level examinations over the decades should have served as a cautionary tale. After all, our track record with the business of exams—in terms of policy and practice—has been dismal. I shall mention two instances. If we examine the history of the IIT entrance exams—better known as the JEE—it is somewhat similar to the developing CUET story. It started out with pious intentions, but there was an inherent flaw in the thought process. Those early pioneers were seemingly unaware of a dictum I often quote: an examination is only as good as the people who create it. They were not distinguished either as academics or scientists or as experts of testing. They also committed the fatal mistake of getting into a competitive one-upmanship with a very successful JEE coaching centre of Mumbai. In the process, they lost sight of the need to evolve JEE into a test of creativity-based learning. In fact, quite the contrary happened.

I can see similar warning signs appearing on the road being travelled by CUET. The same story repeats itself in our medical entrance examinations. The upshot is that the very process adds considerably to the stress borne by examinees. All these exams have only succeeded in taking away creativity and learning from India’s education story. Almost all school educators I have sounded out agree that instead of genuine knowledge acquisition and engendering of creativity, students are compelled to get into meaningless rote learning.

Perhaps we need to pay heed to evolving methods of testing that do not cause much stress and yet allow genuine knowledge-based insights to be acquired hand in hand with creativity. After all, a good test is one that enables the students through their processes of learning instead of disabling them. Here’s one way of doing this: introduce a limited number of well-thought-out questions in every subject-based question paper of the regular school-leaving exam, and use the performance of examinees in these questions to benchmark exam performance. In parallel, India needs to develop genuine expertise in the realm of testing where scholarship and knowledge are at a premium. ■

All our exams, even if they start off with pious intentions, end up descending into mechanistic chores