Education, Careers & Professional News
The real test
Source
The Hindu
Date
2005-03-28
Information
“IF THE student answers a question, saying a frog has four legs, he gets four marks, but if he gives the answer as three legs, he gets three marks, and for two legs, two marks… .
A former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras made this casual remark about the higher secondary examinations of the State Board.
Sounds humourous? It is actually an insightful comment.
It explains how Plus-Two students manage to get 199 or 200 out of 200 just by reproducing from the textbook. An entire industry thrives in western Tamil Nadu solely depending on this situation. A set of schools in that area creates bunches of super students, who grab large chunks of seats in professional colleges, only by memorising the book and from reproducing it verbatim.
But the dream run does not last. Talk to serving or former directors of medical education or technical education or even teachers in professional colleges, they firmly attest to this reality. They list instances of these so-called toppers struggling to pass the first few semesters in key subjects where the students competence to apply knowledge to new situations (not prescribed in the textbook) is tested.
Take the results of January 2005 first semester BE/B.Tech examination of Anna University: A déjà vu of what has been happening in the last two years. Students failure rate is higher in engineering mathematics, mechanics, engineering drawing and chemistry. It is in these subjects that students have to apply what they have learned in a theory class.
The qualifying examination has very little value. And only the entrance tests separate the best from the rest.
But before going to the details let us start with the basics. The entire Plus-Two question paper, including the language papers have questions only from the textbook. With no scope for innovation. Naturally, students who get high marks are unable to cross even the first hurdle in the IIT Joint Entrance or the All-India Pre-Medical Pre Dental Examinations. Of course, one can argue endlessly on how these examinations follow the CBSE syllabus and curriculum. But as veteran teachers such as P.V. Navaneethakrishnan and A. Ganesan say: Once the fundamentals are strong and a student is oriented towards looking at a nationwide picture, he / she should be able to crack the tough examinations.
A silver lining is that the State Boards curriculum is changing, and so is the evaluation pattern for different subjects. Education Department insiders say that the new syllabus introduced in 2004 for Class XI has really raised the bar. Both content and quality of the curriculum has gone up substantially.
A department document, unpublicised as yet, the insiders say, puts equal emphasis on one-word answers, short answers and detailed answers, especially in Science subjects. It is a change from the existing pattern where the weightage is slightly skewed for different subjects.
In Mathematics too, the questions seeking detailed solutions are more: 50 per cent of the marks go for these problems.
Veteran educator and curriculum planner, S.S. Rajagopalan, quoting international experts, says the curriculum plan should be clear about learning objectives, learning outcomes and evaluation methodology. Very few evaluators now know the learning objectives and expected outcomes of the curriculum.
Evaluation should test students for knowledge, understanding, application, analysis / synthesis, judgment and evaluation of each subject, especially maths or science. For years, we have never gone beyond the first two or three levels. For languages, there are other different aspects of teaching outcomes.
Ultimately, the weightage for knowledge and understanding should come down and that for application of knowledge should go up to 40 per cent. Now very little weightage is given to application of knowledge, Dr. Rajagopalan argues, noting that application should mean, applying knowledge to completely new situations, not prescribed in the book… that is the ultimate test.
The NCERT evaluation system gives 20 per cent weightage to totally new situations. The NCERT plan clearly states how knowledge is revealed — recalling or reproducing; understanding means giving illustrations, detecting errors, comparing, classifying, translating verbal statements to symbolic statements and vice-versa in subjects such as math or chemistry.
A student also needs to find out the adequacy or superficiality or relevance of data to a given problem so that he / she can remove the superficial, select appropriate method to solve a problem and suggest alternative methods (going beyond the textbook), generalise theories and infer information not given.
School heads and students alike complain about the photocopying nature of the State Board evaluation system. While one principal rued the lack of creativity in setting a challenging examination paper, a student said she felt depressed because she was only the `second-best `vomiter in her class.
Curriculum planners are now hopeful that the introduction of the new syllabus for Class XI and XII will improve the evaluation system and a more scientific set of parameters will be introduced to test the different skill levels of students.