Education, Careers & Professional News
Go Ahead With tried & tested CBSE Kudos
Globalisation has brought for students a windfall of choice International Baccalaureate, Cambridge International Examination, Indian School Certificate Examination or the Central Board of Secondary Education but it is the last option that is still favoured by school and college principals in Delhi.
The International Baccalaureate curriculum makes sense mostly for students who are going abroad for undergraduate studies, says Gauri Ishwaran, Sanskriti School.
The programme is available in about 20 schools in India, nearly a third of which are in Delhi. With a high-end fee structure, it is an option for children from affluent homes who are absolutely certain that they will be going abroad for college.
Grace Manger, IB co-ordinator at Pathways World School, and Manisha Malhotra, her counterpart in Shri Ram School, contend that the IB curriculum is a broad-based one, nurturing thinking skills and offering freedom of subject combination.
But what if an IB student does not score enough at SAT to get into a foreign university? This is a question that parents have to ponder, says Jyoti Bose, principal of Springdales.
The IB subjects are different, the scores are different and the timing of the result does not concur with the Delhi University admission schedule. So, a student who does not get admission abroad is left neither here nor there.
Problems like this make heads of institutes lean towards good, old CBSE.
Shashank Vira, CEO of Global Education Management Services, which already has six schools in India, with plans to manage 150 over the next five years, speaks in favour of the CBSE. Till the certification level, we will follow our own curriculum, but at the certification level, most of our schools would be CBSE-affiliated, with exceptions where we feel that the aspirations of the students are aimed more at international colleges.
St Stephens College principal Dr Anil Wilson says, We were not even looking at IB students, but now our Admission Scrutiny Committee will look at the grades sent in by IB students. It is a good system for some humanities subjects but science and maths leave something to be desired. I am actually not unhappy with our own education system. All it needs is to be more proactive.
Cost is a big factor. When both the CBSE and the IB are world class boards, why would parents pay much more for a different way of teaching? asks Bharti Sharma, principal, Amity School, Saket.
CBSE students perform well internationally. Every year, we put about 250 students in Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, with scholarships. If the CBSE could become more flexible and offer not just more creative subject combinations but also different ability levels in each subject, it could become even better, says Shayama Chona, principal, DPS, RK Puram.