Tamil Nadu’s education department officials started to seriously consider holding a public examination for Class 11 based not just on anecdotal evidence and expert opinion but also on a study of performance of students from neighbouring States.
The officials found that, last year, students who were domiciled in Tamil Nadu but wrote their Class 12 in Kerala or Andhra Pradesh garnered the top slots in the single-window engineering, medical and law counselling in the State. Officials also noted the poor performance of Tamil Nadu students in the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET).
In 2016 NEET, only 16.6% of State Board students who appeared for the exam qualified whereas nearly 69% of CBSE students from the State qualified. Similarly, in JEE (Advanced) in 2015-16, 17% qualified, and, in 2016-17, some 22% qualified.
Studying the NEET examination in 2017, they found that nearly half the questions were based on Class 11 syllabus. They felt that holding Class 11 public examinations had helped students from Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The neighbouring States not only gave equal weightage for marks obtained in Class 11 and 12 while calculating the percentage for higher secondary exams but also gave 20 marks for continuous assessment in both the years. While Kerala did not include practicals for assessment, Andhra Pradesh had 20 marks for Class 11 and 30 marks for Class 12.
University suggestions
In March 2013, Anna University’s Mathematics faculty had suggested a common examination for Class 11 and giving equal weightage for Class 11 and 12 marks “to determine the cut off for admission to higher studies.”
The university introduced a bridge course in Mathematics but the results of its 2016 December semester proved that many of its students did not have a sound grasp of the fundamentals. In that exam, nearly 13% of Chennai students failed in Mathematics, while, for students from across the State, the figure was 21.61%.
Batting for entrance test
When the State had entrance exams for professional courses, only those who studied both Class 11 and 12 portions performed well, recalls J. Mohanasundaram, former Dean of Madras Medical College.
“We noticed that students who did well in entrance exams scored well in Class 12 too, whereas the reverse was not true. It was apparent that students who studied both Class 11 and 12 portions did well in the exam. Even students who took the entrance exam in Tamil performed well if they had studied Class 11 well,” Mr. Mohanasundaram said.