To hold exams or not isn’t a question easily answered

Unfortunate confusion over this dilemma in Karnataka has made school students suffer needlessly

is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

The Supreme Court issued an interim stay on a Karnataka high court order which had allowed ‘board examinations’ to be conducted for classes 5, 8, 9 and 11 in schools in Karnataka. It also said that for the examinations that had already been conducted, the results may not be communicated to anyone at all. However, some of the results had already been announced before the Supreme Court issued its order. Earlier, because of the high court’s order and then the stay on it, school examinations had been rescheduled. All this has naturally caused public confusion and angst, not least among students and their parents.

Why would the country’s apex court get involved in whether examinations can be conducted or not in schools? A bit of history will throw some light. The Karnataka state government decided last year that annual examinations will be conducted for the four classes mentioned earlier. A representative body of some private schools filed a suit in the Karnataka high court, requesting that these exams not be allowed. The high court put a stop to the exams, but a review by a bench of the same high court stayed that order, allowing them to be conducted. The litigants went to the Supreme Court and got the interim stay order.

What are the reasons behind litigants not wanting examinations to be conducted? Let us not speculate on that. But the basis of their legal argument can be examined. It goes back to the Right to Education Act 2009 (RTE), whose clause 16 reads “no child admitted in a school shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education,” and clause 30 reads, “no child shall be required to pass any board examination till completion of elementary education.”

The RTE took the right stand on board examinations and detention (‘failing’) of children in classes up to 8. The deeply problematic effects of a high-stakes exercise like board exams are well known. The social and psychological effects of detaining children in classes are profoundly damaging. And all of this is even more harmful for younger children. The twin terrors of ‘failing’ and board examinations were addressed by the RTE, and rightly so.

The RTE also envisioned that the learning of all children will be continuously assessed and evaluated during class hours, and which will be used to improve their learning. This is called ‘continuous comprehensive evaluation’ (CCE).

The CCE system has been poorly executed from 2010 onwards. Because of interrelated issues: the capacity of teachers; the effort required to do exhaustive (almost daily) assessments for all children in every class; mechanistic guidelines from state departments, and more. The best of schools and teachers have struggled with CCE.

As a result, over the past 15 years, children got promoted from one class to the next till class 8, and there has been no certain way of knowing whether they have learnt what they should have. Many teachers and parents have been vocal advocates for examinations and detention, claiming children have lost the incentive to learn. Other, more astute observers have pointed out that without a clear mechanism of feedback, even children and their parents don’t know what learning is happening. Advocates of ‘no detention’ alleged that teachers and others were shirking their responsibilities by arguing for examinations and detention. We cannot get into this charged debate in this piece; let us just say that any extreme position is fraught with problems.

What has been completely clear, however, is that for a vast majority of students till class 8, there has been no reasonably precise way of knowing what children have learnt. This is a disservice to all, especially the children, who bear the brunt of it when exams start in class 9, as they have no way to recover what wasn’t learnt.

Almost everyone in the practice of school education is bothered about this tangle. No one wants the terror of board examinations and detention, while recognizing the fundamental problem of children being promoted without ascertaining their learning.

It was to resolve this tangle that the Karnataka government decided to have annual examinations for these classes, while making clear that these are not board exams; these are only annual tests, and that children will not be detained on the basis of their results, which would only be used as feedback to inform students, teachers, the school and parents. It could also be used to understand how the Karnataka state school education system is performing.

Since this is the clear purpose of these examinations, it is unclear to me why such evaluations should be interpreted as the kind of exams that the RTE has rightly stopped. Karnataka has found a practical way of resolving the knot that we tied ourselves into—without in any way violating the spirit or letter of the country’s education law. Karnataka should be lauded for this and other states should follow.

There is a deeper issue involved. We need to be extra cautious in legislating on any matter which is complex and has multiple facets. Legislation and subsequent adjudication are not necessarily the most effective way to resolve all matters in a society. Certainly, matters that have no specific and clear solutions cannot be solved through legislative action. Such an approach is likely to harden positions, and then real people suffer—in this case, our children.