In his book Exam Warriors, while providing helpful tips for scoring well in exams, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gives a deeply disturbing insight into the Indian education system. It was a confession straight from the horse’s mouth, an inexplicit submission about the flawed assessment machinery of the country.
Are the Board Exams a Real Test of Learning?
The pathology of tricks that help in cracking an exam is quite curious. The fact that an assessment system is so vulnerable that it can be deceived by few individuals reflects a sorry state of affairs.
An authentic evaluation of learning should be fraud-proof. It should be immune to manoeuvres that can be employed to present a deceptive picture of learning outcomes.
If the board exams are going to be used as a parameter to decide who enters certain institutions and who doesn’t, it would be difficult to justify their need for long. Apart from several human and systemic errors that the board exams are prone to, there are valid concerns regarding the fairness of board exams.
Coaching Ensures it’s No Longer a Level-Playing Field
The board exams are no longer a level-playing field. With a thriving coaching industry that offers money-back guarantee, it is, in fact, easy to inflate one’s marks in the board exams with a little extra money. A large number of CBSE toppers coming from metros who’ve studied in fancy private schools cannot be a matter of pure luck. If one’s parents are wealthy and educated, then with better coaching facilities that child stands a chance of scoring well in the board exams.
Much of your score is subject to ‘coach-ability’ ahead of the board exams. Even descriptively, they aren’t a measure of general intelligence or potential but your alignment with a particular pattern of testing. The more docile you are to the pattern or the better training that you can receive with extra cash, the higher is your score — it’s no rocket science, really! Of course, there are dark horses once in a while.
Unlike India, in the United States, this correlation between privilege and achievement in a test has been well-documented. It is said that you can predict a candidate’s score by their family income in the SAT. The case of board exams in our country can’t be any different.
However, a statistical corroboration of the same will require transparency on the part of the CBSE. Remember last year’s explosive story about moderation (spiking) of marks by the CBSE? Debarghya Das, a young data scientist, had to illegitimately mine the results to get the CBSE to confess.
The Language Barrier
CBSE provides you with a blank space to enter the language one would prefer while answering questions in exams. While it may seem very democratic to recognise the linguistic diversity of students sitting for an exam, the board doesn’t have a framework to ensure that non-English answer scripts are checked fairly. Many teachers are capable of evaluating only in English, the language they use to teach in a classroom.
A senior teacher with multiple years experience evaluating copies of board exams, on the condition of anonymity, said:
It is a rare case that you get an answer script in Hindi. How are we expected to know the Hindi translation of all academic jargon? The humane treatment that we can accord to English answer scripts simply isn’t possible for those from other languages. We can’t read in between the lines and judge fairly!
Not a single CBSE topper, till date, has come from a non-English medium. Are we suggesting that the language of knowledge and education is by default English, and those not proficient in it (owing to social circumstances they didn’t choose) are never as smart as the urban anglophiles?
It is disappointing that the research on testing and learning in India hasn’t produced any significant literature comparable to American studies like Minority Testing Bias. It’s hard to get the right answers when you don’t understand the questions. It is now that we understand that our board exam papers may indeed have cultural and linguistic biases that have for years put a large number of students at a disadvantage.
Pressure May Not Necessarily Improve Performance
The board exams are infamous for being all about time management during a three-hour paper. Research has shown that this tight schedule of exams may result in performance gaps, especially between males and females. Studies have found conclusive proof that males respond better to competitive incentives than their female counterparts. During the board exams when ‘there’s a single, timed opportunity to win’ males have a statistically established chance of excelling.
The study found that if women were provided with a second-round trial and were not timed, they easily matched or outperformed their male peers who previously scored much higher than them.
Rigorous tests like the board exams may also jeopardise a female candidate’s performance with what is commonly called ‘stereotype threat’ in the academic community. It is being at the risk of confirming, as a self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's social group, especially when exposed to conditions of testing.
Brian Willoughby and Ellen Braaten’s book Bright Kids Who Can’t Keep Up brilliantly illustrates how children with ‘processing speed deficits’ are heavily discriminated against in timed tests purposed to compare learning outcomes. They write that “information processing speed… cannot be understood in isolation from other areas such as language, memory, or attention.”
And this cognitive difference has to be adequately taken care of to claim fairness in our tests.
Their findings are particularly relevant for mass assessments like the board exams where better presentation, stress management, neat handwriting and other gimmicks are influential factors.
None of this suggests that it is possible to do away with all kinds of prejudices in testing; instead, we should openly acknowledge their unreliability as a measurement of the mind. Only when the CBSE itself stops pretending fairness will it be truly be fair to millions of kids and parents who innocently believe its story.
(Akshat Tyagi is the author of ‘Naked Emperor of Education’. He tweets at @AshAkshat. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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