Out with rankings, in with gradings : Moving beyond the 3 hrs exam time
- Sangai Express Editorial :: May 23, 2013 -
Out with rankings, in with the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation of students under the Summative Assessment and Formative Assessment yardstick.
Out with pass, in with 'qualified'. Stretch this a little and it could mean adopting a system to blunt the rat race, bordering on the mad.
The Central Board of Secondary Education, New Delhi has been following this pattern after the persistent initiatives of the then Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal and it has been in vogue for some years now.
Cut to the present and the Council of Higher Secondary Education, Manipur has adopted this pattern by announcing the 2013 Class XII examination sans rankings.
Not yet very clear if the CCE and the SA and FA formats of the CBSE were followed to the T but the efforts to change with the demands of the time is significant.
As in the case when anything new is adopted, there are certain to be differing takers to the new pattern followed by the COHSEM, but it is also important to note that the CCE pattern broadly examines the performance of the students through out the whole year and their academic proficiency or lack of it is not decided within the three hours period, known as examination.
In a way this is also a methodology where no students can 'fail' and the onus of recognising the potential of the students in other areas of life falls on the teachers.
Revolutionary in a sense, especially in a place like Manipur, where the rat race can be seen in the mushrooming of numerous coaching centres, where the focus is on how to score as much marks as possible, while knowledge perse has been relegated to the back burner.
A case where learning by rot has been given the stamp of approval. This however is not to belittle the marking and ranking system which was in vogue earlier, but looking with a sense of hope at a new pattern which the COHSEM has been gutsy enough to adopt.
There is no doubt that marks and by extension rankings continue to rule the roost in the world of academics or in the life of students.
However the merit of evaluating the performance of a student over a period of time, instead of straitjacketing it within three hours inside the examination hall cannot be over looked.
This is how the new pattern should be understood. The biggest slip will perhaps lie in how well trained and committed are the teachers in keeping a tab on the performance of the students through out the whole year.
From examining a paper, written in three hours, and then accordingly awarding the marks which will decide the rankings, it is now a question of constantly checking the performances of the students, besides identifying their strength, which will best equip them with life skills in the future.
It is this question which should not go unregistered in the minds of the people who matter, especially the people helming the affairs at COHSEM.
Not surprisingly, when the results of the Class XII examination, 2013 was uploaded on the official website of COHSEM there was widespread confusion amongst the public.
The decision to abolish the ranking system may have been announced earlier, but it would have been that much better if only COHSEM had added a foreword that rankings and divisioning the students have been done away with in accordance with the resolution taken earlier.
That it failed to do so was disappointing to say the least.
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