360 degrees: Exams will bring out best of kids

The Central government's decision to have annual examination for every class from 1st to 12th is definitely a positive move, because students need a minimum knowledge and performance which should be evaluated annually to enable students to move up from one standard to the next. To promote them without a basic annual test would mean that they are never tested for applying their knowledge and their skills in a given timeframe to challenge their intellect.

It is also important that students should be tested in application of skills from 8th to 12th standard. A minimum of a fifth of the questions should be application oriented and should be from out of the textbook although it should be related to the prescribed syllabus. The final examination of 10th and 12th standard should also be designed in a way to find out the best among the best. It is only by the filtration process that we can identify the cream for higher learning to become leaders beating the mediocre and the below average students.

When the question papers are straight forward and from the text book, many students score 100/100 making it difficult to rank top students. For example, of the 10 lakh students who appeared in the 10th standard state board examination last year, more than one student scored 100/100 in the science subject. This only points out that the government must, with the help of educationists, design a proper examination system from the 6th standard onwards in which students are slowly exposed to application oriented questions.

Maybe, for the benefit of rural students, the examination can be made easier to pass but difficult to score centum. The level of the difficulty of examination should slowly increase from one standard to another. This is the tapered way to test their skills and assess their potential. The slow learners may be given additional chances in tutorial classes and other such aids, but the sooner we pick the cream the better it would be for the whole system of education. Those without skills in formal schooling are bound to find avenues in which they can shine.

At the present standards of the education system, where in all students are made to pass right up to standard VIII without tests and the 10th and 12th standard students are scoring centum in greater numbers every year, it is the quality of education that is actually suffering. Such dilution of quality means that when students step up to the college level, their basic knowledge is not up to the expectation of the industries who have to employ them.

Right now, out of every 100 students who pass out from college, only 25 are employable. Creating such a huge bank of unemployable or underemployed educated graduates is a big threat to our country. To overcome this, our education system needs a complete revamp. In our current syllabus, students learn 80% theoretically and only 20% practically. Instead we should have 50 per cent theoretical and remaining should be 50 per cent  practical and skill, activity based learning. The introduction of activity based learning in school and also implementing at least 15% of the questions that an engineering university student would have to face in his examinations in the first year might help bring in the kind of application oriented questions that will challenge the ability and thinking of our students.

We can say this any number of times, but students must realise that learning and evaluation in the education system is not to gain marks but to gain knowledge. Parents should make the students to learn the subject by understanding it rather than memorising it. In the current system of the examination, students are tested and evaluated by what they can remember rather than what they know in terms of real knowledge. In this context, it is heartening to see our Prime Minister taking the right steps in introducing skill oriented training programs for the students to make them employable. The current facts and scenario and what we have learnt from them suggest this is the right for the government to bring back the examination for students to move from one standard to another from a very early age.

(The writer is an eminent career counsellor and academician)