Preparing for an uncertain academic year ahead during the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education has decided on an assessment scheme for Classes 10 and 12 for 2021-22 under various scenarios, including the possibility that Board examinations can be conducted, should circumstances improve. The year gone by was extremely challenging for all Boards, and the CBSE had to hastily come up with a scheme to assess candidates in Class 12. It became clear that even with its high emphasis of academics, there was considerable deprivation for some students, and not all got the opportunity to complete their syllabus or attend online classes even in the national capital. The wide coverage of the Board, as of 2019, includes 1,138 Kendriya Vidyalayas, 2,727 government schools, 17,553 independent schools, 598 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas and 14 Central Tibetan schools, and schools abroad. The diversity of students and their varied backgrounds was apparently reckoned to some degree while drafting the scheme for the coming year, which includes a mix of internal assessments for Classes 9-10 and 11-12, and term examinations in November-December and in March-April 2022. There will be a rationalised, compartmentalised syllabus split into two halves for each term. The scheme, which has the benefit of advance planning unlike the past year, must be responsive to the issues faced by all institutions in remote locations and the deprivation faced by less privileged students.
The CBSE’s special scheme relies on syllabus rationalisation done through expert evaluation of interconnectivity of subjects, and a centralised protocol of question papers and marking scheme for the term examinations. In the case of term I, it will be a multiple-choice question (MCQ) type test stretching over 90 minutes, with machine-readable optical marking, and for term II, a short-and-long-answers model, if circumstances permit. Efficient as it may sound, the multiple-choice model is critiqued by some as inferior, with sometimes irrelevant and meaningless questions that add up to little in terms of assessment, helping only the marking process. An adjunct to the MCQ pattern could be a decentralised process, empowering regional CBSE units and external experts to consider the state of particular districts and come up with assessments tailored to specific situations. At the same time, the Board has done well to plan for different scenarios that could be imposed by the pandemic, where either of the term examinations or both cannot be held, or the second term has to be converted into the MCQ type. The fallback option in the worst-case scenario is a combination of internal assessments, practical and project work and theory examinations taken at home. The extreme uncertainty underscores the need to take online lessons to all classes of students, and factor in schools with special needs.
