Our policy-makers have an uncanny knack for locating options to current issues that create much more issues. The latest announcement that admissions to 45 UGC-funded Central Universities will now be completely by way of the Central College Entrance Check (CUET) is a working example. The obvious purpose, in fact, is to “create a stage discipline”.
The story appears acquainted: the college admissions system has been riddled with very excessive admission cutoffs for a lot of topics/establishments, college students from these examination boards which award excessive marks have a bonus over people who award low marks. Final 12 months, there was even a case of obvious “marks jihad” when college students from the Kerala state board took a lion’s share of the seats on supply. What’s the answer to this drawback? Dump board examinations for college admissions and substitute them with an entrance check.
However the issue is with the board examinations, and never with the admissions course of which was merely utilizing their scores. The answer lies in addressing the issues related to board examinations and never in altering the admissions system.
Listed below are some very apparent issues that ought to have been completed way back:
Ending the “moderation” of the particular marks that college students get of their board examinations as a result of that is what results in marks inflation, ultra-high scores (and strange peaks at “95%” in CBSE twelfth boards); your complete course of is non-transparent and devoid of any scientifically-validated foundation.
The distribution of marks from numerous board examinations ought to have been compiled for the final 5 or 10 years; a statistical evaluation would have allowed an equivalence to be established between completely different boards. In brief, this is able to have allowed us to conclude that 90% of the X Board is “equal” to 75% of the Y Board. Worldover, famend establishments keep some information of this kind to get a way of how you can evaluate college students from X and Y boards. Establishments overseas that admit worldwide college students, primarily based on the varsity commencement marks, typically monitor related information throughout boards situated in several international locations!
A coordination council, with of representatives of various boards and the related central companies – just like the NCERT – concerned with faculty schooling, ought to have calibrated what components of a nationwide curriculum can be widespread throughout boards, and what “greatest” pedagogical practices (i.e teaching-learning, testing-grading) must be accepted universally. With out these, the “huge” boards – CBSE, ICSE – will proceed to dominate in each manner over all different boards, as they do right now. The Council of Boards of Faculty Training (COBSE) ought to have resolved these points a few years in the past.
These measures would have made board marks extra significant – with out all of the inflation and mysterious peaks – and comparable throughout boards. These might have even allowed us to decrease the stakes – if not do away with – among the extra excruciating entrance examinations just like the JEE and the NEET.
As a substitute, the proposed answer – the CUET – has, in a single stroke, hammered the final nail into the coffin of board examinations by making them of no relevance in any respect. Instructing will shortly orient in direction of scoring nicely within the entrance examination. College students will nonetheless have the stress of clearing board examinations. A rote-learning system, which was anyway of restricted significance, will sink to even decrease ranges of significance, and merely change into a ceremony of passage, an empty train in formal credentialing.
However listed below are the opposite – very doubtless – “unanticipated” penalties of this resolution:
No matter little “long-form” studying college students do at school might be uncared for, displaced by the pressing have to “focus” on objective-type questions within the CUET. We will say goodbye to even the restricted quantity of reading-writing expertise which can be imparted at school, nevertheless imperfectly. A A number of Alternative Query (MCQ) format might be emphasised. That is maybe the worst approach to consider individuals for many topics, particularly the humanities, literature, social sciences and even some components of pure sciences.
We are going to witness a dramatic growth of the already-giant teaching business, dabbling in a a lot better number of topics than they do right now. The most important advertising and marketing alternative has simply been delivered to this business on a platter. The variety of aspiring candidates right here run into crores, in comparison with JEE and NEET, the place the numbers are of the order of lakhs. On condition that essentially the most important challenge with teaching is affordability-related inequity, the CUET will add very generously to extra inequity. The “collaborations” between colleges and training courses will develop in numbers and significance.
We may even see the transformation of pure intelligence into synthetic intelligence, actually, with the creation of query banks and follow solutions primarily based on sample recognition. Data might be changed by bits of knowledge.
The New Training Coverage (NEP) goals at selling extra pondering and evaluation in the varsity expertise. It’s ironic that the identical coverage is being cited to justify the creation of an entrance examination that can make the varsity expertise much more mechanical. We shouldn’t be stunned if an increasing number of college students graduating from faculty, outfitted principally with superficial data, come beneath the affect of the “WhatsApp University”.
Coverage-making on this sphere seesaws to extremes. In 2013, the board examination scores got weight within the JEE system for admission to engineering institutes. Doubtful strategies – with none scientific foundation and information evaluation – had been devised to “normalize” board examination scores throughout boards (see here and here for the total story). Paens had been sung to the significance of faculty schooling to justify this measure, however there was no recognition of the illnesses that afflict the varsity system. Then, in 2017, this measure was withdrawn as a result of it was discovered that marks couldn’t be normalized correctly as a result of – lo and behold – the boards had been so completely different! We now see an growth of this coverage – of the primacy of entrance examinations – to all college admissions as nicely.
Entrance examinations for engineering and medical establishments have survived for many years solely due to the “stage enjoying discipline” and the “board marks should not dependable” arguments. Loads that ought to have been completed earlier can nonetheless be completed straight away, as talked about above, to reform the board examinations in order that they can be utilized for college admissions. There is no such thing as a level in inflicting one more grand entrance examination upon college students.
After all we’d like honest follow-up with deeper and longer reforms associated to the curriculum and teaching-learning strategies. At the least on this Amrit Kaal, we should always be capable of reform our faculty schooling programs in order that they change into credible sufficient to obviate the necessity for large-scale entrance examinations.
(Anurag Mehra is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Affiliate College on the Heart for Coverage Research, at IIT Bombay.)
Disclaimer: These are the private opinions of the writer.
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