Skip to main content

CBSE and Assessment


 Assessment is both an art and a technique. India's largest school education board, CBSE, has made a mockery of assessment this time with the first terminal examinations of classes 10 and 12. The pandemic forced upon all of us certain changes. CBSE changed its assessment methods by making them all objective type multiple choice questions. Well, circumstances demand certain changes and we won't grumble about that. But how can a mammoth educational board create downrightly ridiculous questions? Doesn't the Board have people with sufficient expertise to prepare effective assessment strategies and methods?

As an English teacher, I find the English question paper given to my students yesterday pathetically ineffective particularly in the Writing section. Let me provide a few examples. 

Question 20 is about the qualifications required for a receptionist. There are 4 options and 2 of them are: (a) personality, age, experience and (b) age, qualification, experience. Now, which is the right answer? Well, CBSE insists that only (b) is the right answer. Why not (a)? Doesn't personality matter for a receptionist? Earlier in sample answers, the Board used to insist on seeking receptionists with "pleasing" personalities. Has the pandemic obviated the need for a 'pleasing' personality at the reception?

Question 23 asks the examinees to choose the relevant information from the options given for a notice about enrichment classes for students of classes 10 and 12. According to the Key provided to evaluators, dress code of the students is in and time table for the classes is out. How are the examinees to know that the dress code matters more for the Board than class timings?

Questions 24 and 28 both are the same: "Select the option that lists an appropriate title for the article." [Well, it could have been put more elegantly: Select an appropriate title for the article.] There are different options provided for both questions showing that different answers are acceptable in questions like this. But CBSE will decide which option should be chosen by the examinees. How is an examinee to know CBSE's choice?

Question 27 gives 4 different quotes and asks "Which quote should Vijay (the article writer) use to sum up the idea of his article?" All four quotes are about the topic and all of them are good enough to conclude an article with. How is a student to divine the Board's likes and dislikes here? 

I have just highlighted some prominent absurdities. There are many more. Let me wind up with one from the literature section. Question 33 is from the lesson 'Deep Water' which describes the author's narrow escape from a drowning experience. "I had experienced both the sensation of dying and the terror that the fear of it can produce...," the author says. Now the question is: Of the four meanings of 'sensation' select the option that matches in meaning with its usage in the extract (the quote above). And the right option, according to the Board's Key, is: 'Physical response to a stimulus.' Really? Did Douglas mean to describe his physical response to dying in that part of the lesson?

The question paper has a lot more anomalies. Such examinations do no good to anyone, not to the students anyway. Like a lot many other teachers with whom I discussed this matter yesterday after the exam was over, I hope that CBSE will look into this matter with all the seriousness it demands. 

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 4, 2021 at 10:58 AM

    Absolutely right Sir

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownDecember 4, 2021 at 11:16 AM

    That was too much🥴

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 4, 2021 at 11:50 AM

    ������

    ReplyDelete
  4. suhavijayDecember 4, 2021 at 11:52 AM

    So very true Sir, I could agree with each and every word you said

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownDecember 4, 2021 at 11:54 AM

    Really

    ReplyDelete
  6. Aliyas Pappalil /ഏലിയാസ് പാപ്പാലിൽ December 4, 2021 at 12:28 PM

    Appreciate for your good observation nd commitment of a good cbsc teacher. Thanks sir

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownDecember 4, 2021 at 12:45 PM

    Hey completely support evry point given here. I mean u have told the same dilemma of the options i had in the exam hall. Sooo good to hear that from a teacher...

    ReplyDelete
  8. JstrangerDecember 4, 2021 at 12:48 PM

    Yes exactly my thoughts sir

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownDecember 4, 2021 at 5:02 PM

    Yes sir what you said is 100 percent correct

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousDecember 4, 2021 at 10:32 PM

    Completely agree with you sir.. Few years back CBSE decided for English to be as the first exam for XII th was to make the students tension free.. this year what happened has affected them so badly.. they lost confidence for the coming exams.. Certainly CBSE should look forward seriously and do justice to students..

    ReplyDelete
  11. UnknownDecember 5, 2021 at 7:47 AM

    Very true sir, children lost their confidence too😒

    ReplyDelete
  12. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 5, 2021 at 4:46 PM

    " Such examinations do no good to anyone, " Why are they even holding it if they can't assign the job of setting the question paper to a competent person.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 5, 2021 at 5:15 PM

      In fact there was no need for this exam. One annual exam as usual would be enough. Why does CBSE make things unnecessarily complicated? The Board doesn't even pay teachers on duty. Many including me are yet to get the remuneration for exam duties of last year. It's such a miserable Board.

      Delete
  13. HiteshFebruary 21, 2022 at 6:14 PM

    Thanks a lot for the information, it will help a lot Magarpatta school

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
8 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more