Delivering on Redesigned Secondary School Assessments

Corrected Images from PARAKH

For those who are clueless about the context, here are necessary documents to study in detail. You can still get a good idea of the intent, design and rationale without studying these, esp. if you are immersed in the education domain.

1. National Education Policy (2020)
2. National Curriculum Framework — School Education (2023)
3. Holistic Progress Cards (HPC led by PARAKH)

Now, for a while, I have held that a singular performance should not be used to judge the potential or capabilities of an individual. If I woke up with a fever on the day of my exam, I am unlikely to do it well although I was the topper throughout the year. Even if I wasn’t the topper, my performance is not a true indicator of my competence.

A much better indicator is consistency of performance. It is difficult to fake over time and is a better representative of sustained drive and competence. I propose a dual scheme which is not limited to secondary schooling.

Scheme 1: School Performance Score (SPS)

Before some readers roll their eyes and declare this complicated, I request your patience. I will attempt to simplify it for you.

For grade 9–12, most of what PARAKH recommended (in the 1st image of this post) has been retained.

Here are 2 requests from a student.

Request 1: Please allow me to showcase my many competences and capabilities in more than 1 way (allowing me to suggest ways, as well).

Request 2: Help me channelise my interests into career-related academic or vocational pursuits so that my mind-body-heart are quite in sync.

Keeping these in mind, the scheme becomes more obvious.

Guideline 1: Admit the various interests (even if they are non-cognitive) of a student either via the HPC or a separate avenue.

In the spirit of the HPC, a student’s entirety needs to be recorded and recognised. While the images from PARAKH do not explicitly include sports and arts and skills in the “Formative Assessment” bracket, there is no reason to exclude them. Given our increasing realisation that a wholesome individual is better than a top-scoring one, there is sufficient clarity to include these in the “internal formative assessment” bracket. Some of these might find representation in some clause of the HPC for that grade level, but if it doesn’t they should still be allowed. They can either be captured as an interest that the student has developed and pursued for a while or a career-oriented competence that the student is developing. Hence, a robotics workshop/course that a student takes could fall into either of these.

Every such investment/exploration that the student undertakes must be represented by a performance artifact to be considered. This might be a project/capstone that was part of the workshop/course deliverable for earning a certificate or a video tutorial/How-To booklet that the student has created based on the learnings from the workshop/course.

This then creates the need for workshops/courses to be registered with the accreditation body to be deemed as genuine. This ensures that no one has setup a “theli” to churn out certificates and AI modified videos of student presentations. Over and above this list of registered courses, colleges and universities can filter further to pick the most serious ones that indeed create a solid learning experience. A registered workshop must provide a twin (similar quality) in Tier 2–3 towns and/or a village before it can apply for registeration. In short, one can make this as genuine and water-tight as one desires and that shan’t be detailed here.

Guideline 2: Student agency and parental involvement ensures that the right weightage is given to a student’s competencies.

In grade levels 6–8, students and parents get to learn how to represent the student’s capabilities and intelligences. This creates occasion for dialogue between parents, teachers and student and thus, increased awareness of what the student is capable of or not. This, too, can be made genuine and water-tight. If a student loves collecting, say, coins he can showcase this in the personal interest section but might choose to give it only a 5% weight. If the student develops this interest into studying the history or metallurgy or financial systems surrounding these coins, then the parents, teachers and the student might choose to give it 10% weight. This allows for the parent, teacher and student to curate from a list of possibilities to strategically manage time and energy.

By extending this, all of a student’s explorations, investments and interests find a place in different sections (including the school’s HPC). This goes on through grades 6–8 before taking a more structured approach in grades 9–10 before crystallising in grades 11–12.

The school will also have its internal projects, conclaves, workshops, competitions, olympiads, benchmark tests, external performances etc. which can all contribute to the HPC score or the internal assessment scores of grades 9–12 (with a weight of 70%, 40%, 40% and 30% respectively)

The exams, tests still carry weight but are no longer the only thing that will be considered.

Once the score for each grade is computed, say, 89, 94, 72, 98, 90, my recommendation is to let the student, parent and teacher decide on the weightage to be assigned to each grade level to arrive at a final score that represents the 5 years. This score will have a 50% weightage while computing the overall school performance score for the student. Grades 11 & 12 will contribute 25% each. Thus, my overall school performance score (SPS) is not about 2 sets of exams but my sustained conduct, growth, intelligence, curiosity, progress, diligence and discipline across 7 years as recognised by several players and institutions! This is how it might look:

A sample illustration of the school performance score

How does one arrive at scores is a detail that is easier to solve than accepting this approach. The key elements of this scheme is that sports, health, aesthetic development, skill development, emotional well-being and cognitive development all find place here. One can even mandate that these must be given some minimal weightage to disallow their exclusion, i.e. a student must have explored a sport or physical activity thoroughly well every single year AND developed some aesthetic facet of their being as well AND picked up a vocational skill (from permaculture to drone navigation etc.). Hence, unlike today’s existing assessment schemes which are purely mono-dimensional, you now have a truly multidimensional representation in which parent and student have a say.

Scheme 2: Performance assessed for university admission

Universities must be mandated to give weightage to the school performance score (SPS), lest they pronounce schooling pointless. No college or university should be allowed to assign a score without factoring in the SPS with a minimum weightage of 50%. Hence, an engineering college might assign 50% to JEE and the rest to the SPS. An IIT might assign 10% to JEE-Mains, 40% to JEE-Advanced and the rest to SPS. Any institution that has faith in its system and faculty (unlike the IITs) could assign 70% to SPS and 30% to some common entrance exam. Feel free to add some weight for interviews and SoP etc. Why would any intelligent institution trust one agency (NTA) over 1–2 exams rather than a multitude of experts who have recognised the student over 7 years?

If the universities want some say in what constitutes a crowd-scourced SPS, they can specify the contributions they consider acceptable, e.g. NTSC performance, Dr. Homi Bhabha Balvaidnyanik Competition scores, paper/article published in APU’s magazine, project selected in Intel ISIS conference or National Science Congress etc. Universities can curate their list of 3000+ acceptable avenues of expertise demonstration by keeping in mind a range of students from all over India and the world. If the list only included things that someone living in Delhi can access then there is no point and reveals the short-sightedness of the university. Participating in a turtle conservation project should also feature in this list. Competitions by National Geographic, Discovery channel etc. should also feature in this list. Journals and eclectic magazines that recognise serious talent and competencies should be on this list. Actual fieldwork with organisations that are very serious in their domains should, in my opinion, form the lion’s share of this list.

If you disregard the scale in the illustration below, here is a possible distribution of demonstration of capability with the Consistent Performance + Critical Indicator (like NTSC scores, Olympiad scores, paper published and other subject specific but variedly assessed avenues relevant to the undergraduate course) portion indicating the SPS (LoR is letters of recommendation and not LoTR spelled wrong and Test is JEE or NEET or CUET etc.):

Finally, I think any institution worth their salt should be able to take a student who has demonstrated a base level of intelligence and capabilities and grow him/her into a good graduate. What if a basic minimum is defined and then a lottery system picks according to the number of available seats for that category (G/OBC/SC/ST/whatever). I know this is controversial, so I will keep it to a paragraph!

What are the advantages of scheme 2:

1. All the lip-service about wanting to develop and recognise a holistically developed individual is replaced with actually demanding it.
2. Hegemony of NTA and coaching institutes is destroyed. You can’t have ghost schools unless you want a score of 0 in your internal assessments.
3. Universities need to get off their high horses and define what kind of students they encourage and can support. Universities will no longer receive a cute single number. The vulgarity of DU 98.9856% cut-off will be done and over with!
4. A lot more investment will be seen from universities in defining legitimate avenues and multi-dimensional competencies. If an IIT-M came back with only academic avenues, it will be shot down necessitating an inclusion of some weight to, say, laurels in the zila parishad sports events and weightage to the all India Camlin painting contest, a certificate from Dyson on air-conditioning, or IDEO on design thinking skills etc.
5. Our graduates are likely to be more well-rounded and ready for the industry.
6. You can’t game the system consistently over 7 years across so many dimensions. I do not see a Kota factory that has assembly lines for Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Arts, Sports, Vocational skills, STEM, Dance, Music and so on! In the worst case, the corruption will be spread across a million players and not just a few dozen.
7. Many more well-meaning learning and skill development players can enter the system and create a genuine ecosystem of variegated learning and exposure. A tabla maestro in Lucknow can apply for recognition and certificates issued by him can be admitted in the tally system. The recognition can be for a time period allowing for inspections and necessary rigour.
8. Students and the industry can petition and demand the recognition of particular skills and competencies thereby keeping the university entry criteria relevant and vibrant.
9. With all avenues publicly available as a list along with university and college preferences as well as career paths etc., students, parents, counselors and schools have a better grasp of curating the right experiences and exposures for the student so that s/he may be able to make well-informed decisions.

Common Objections, Misconceptions, Questions:

Feel free to add more questions and poke holes at this idea. I’ll pick each one and add them to this section.

• How can you give a paltry 25% to grades 11 & 12 in scheme 1? They are the most important! Students will treat it too casually.

— If you notice, grade 11 and grade 12 have been given the highest individual contribution percentage for any grade. 6th-10th (5 years) get only 50% in toto which averages to about 10% for any grade level. By further specifying a 40–60 & 30–70 split in the scoring, the seriousness is very clearly communicated without being hyper-focused on one exam.

• Why can’t we simply settle with the PARAKH system?

— Firstly, it doesn’t clearly spell out the non-cognitive side of internal assessments. Secondly, it is only over 4 years (usually the same time when the kid goes through coaching classes). Thirdly, there is no student agency in it. I can keep going on to fourthly, fifthly all the way to Bruce Lee. The PARAKH system is a great start and will be a delta improvement over the current school scoring system. But with universities largely disregarding school scores, any improvement to the school scoring system without tying to the university entry system is pointless. The Scheme 1 proposed above paves the road for Scheme 2 thereby forcing universities and colleges to acknowledge the value of schooling by demanding that the schooling years be filled with rich learning experiences. We can definitely start with the PARAKH scheme so that schools warm up to it while insisting on Scheme 2 as well.

• Why do all of this?

— Did you find time to read the post entirely? Reason 1: So that we do not offer lip service via the NEP/HPC etc. to all-round holistic development being relevant. If you call something important but do not recognise it at important stages in one’s life then… I am attempting to fix that. Reason 2: PARAKH’s scheme is such a great first step but without clear guidance on what does “Formative Assessment Marks” entail, it will be each school trying to do something that “sells” their schooling better. By specifying what gets counted as “Formative Assessment Marks” one allows for a standardisation that disallows fudging and artificial increments. One could include internal projects and other activities but certain external exposures and student’s interests would also be taken into account making it a better, clearer, more transparent, publicly defined (with a rubric) framework for all.

• Who is going to keep track of all of this?

— With UDISE+ and so much more in place, the answer is a machine (rather, a data centre, but still a machine). I am a painter registered with the certification authorities. Student no. 7868757646876 came to me and completed a 12 month programme with a good performance. I update against his number on the system. It gets recorded against student no. 7868757646876 and is available for authorised personnel to access. The student, too, could access their learnings so far. HPC entries are going from the school.

• Oh! You crazy fool! Now more people will sell certificates and create magazines for publishing random stuff! You’ve opened hell’s door!

— Crazy fool? Mom!? Is that you? Get off my laptop! A decentralised accreditation system allows for the expertise and expert opinions of the multitude (about a student) to inform decisions. Wisdom of the crowds vs the tyranny of NTA.

• How does my taking sitar classes followed by football followed by painting followed by PCM and IIT coaching classes help me be a better engineer?

— How did taking PCM and IIT coaching classes make you a better engineer anyway? It only made you a safer bet for the lazy engineering colleges. By developing all-round sensitivity you turn out to be a better person with a fit body and an aesthetic grooming. Go ask any org whether they would prefer you or that other chap with the same CGPA but none of these other skills or exposures.

• Doesn’t it place the studious PCM chappie at a disadvantage? She who had no life outside P, C or M would now have no life. How could you do this?

— Errr! I didn’t do anything to her! She still can pursue BSc. in P, C or M and then an MSc and then a PhD and then her 2nd PhD and her 3rd and so on. I just gave her a better life. You are welcome!