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

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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
  4. Yes sir what you said is 100 percent correct

    ReplyDelete
  5. 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
  6. Very true sir, children lost their confidence too😒

    ReplyDelete
  7. " 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. 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
  8. Thanks a lot for the information, it will help a lot Magarpatta school

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...