A “cumulative credit system” that will account for students’ performance in classes 9, 10, and 11 in class 12, the final stage of secondary school, a question paper design to serve as a blueprint for exams, and setting up a question bank for the senior classes — these are some of the major recommendations made by PARAKH, a constituent body under the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in a report submitted to the union ministry of education (MoE) on establishing “equivalence across school boards” in the country.
The recommendations are part of school reforms proposed under the new National Education Policy (NEP) and the National Curriculum Framework- for School Education (NCF-SE).
The report recommends an assessment framework for students in the secondary stage (classes 9 to 12) that allows both formative and summative methods to give a holistic view of their progress. Formative assessment will consist of activities such as project work, presentations, group discussions, etc. Summative assessment means term-end assessment consisting of long answers, MCQs, short, and very short answers.
This means that the performance of students in each of the senior classes in different weightages for each will account for the class 12 result, which is the final stage of school education — class 9 (15%), class 10 (20%), class 11 (25%), and class 12 (40%).
What is the cumulative credit system?
“The weightage of formative and summative marks will be adjusted progressively from classes 9 to 12, increasing the emphasis on summative assessment as the classes advance. Class 9 features a weightage of 70% formative and 30% summative, class 10 there is an equal weightage of 50% for both aspects, in class 11 the distribution is 40% formative and 60% summative while in class 12, there will be a ratio of 30% formative and 70% summative. Consequently, the cumulative marks at the end of secondary stage (class 12) will comprise of 15% for class 9, 20% for class 10, 25% for class 11, and 40% for class 12,” the report stated.
Currently, the ratio for external and internal assessment is 80:20, which will change once the new assessment scheme is brought in.
“This assessment framework will ensure a balanced mix of formative (ongoing) and summative (end-term) assessments, providing a holistic assessment of students’ capabilities and readiness for higher education or professional paths,” the analysis said.
The report was submitted to the MoE last month in a meeting chaired by Sanjay Kumar, secretary, School Education and Literacy department, and has been accepted in principle by the government.
News18 had on July 18 reported that PARAKH has proposed a ‘Cumulative Credit System’ to assess the performance of students from classes 9 to 12, including their board exams, for holistic progress monitoring. Last month, the standard-setting body met state education boards for deliberations on the same, upon which each board is to prepare their own roadmap to implement the system of assessment for these senior classes.
The Centre has been focused on standardising all the school education boards in line with the NEP. One of the crucial mandates of PARAKH is to ensure an equivalence of academic standards among learners across all school boards. In India, which has a population of approximately 1.42 billion, around 30% are below the age of 15 (Statista 2024), as per the study.
The report also suggested that the school boards emphasise digital literacy and incorporate comprehensive ICT training within the curriculum in affiliated schools. Besides, boards are required to make career counselling mandatory for the schools affiliated with them or promote a teacher-as-a-counselor model.
“They should ensure that the schools have a career counselor to provide support in respect of future career guidance, job placement assistance, academic and personal counselling and the mental and social well-being of the learner,” it said.
State boards to prepare question banks for classes 9, 11
Under the cumulative system, state boards are being told to prepare a question bank, which will have rubrics for assessment for transparency. The boards will also devise a blueprint, using which the teachers of classes 9 and 11 will prepare question papers for the year-end examinations from the question bank provided, while in classes 10 and 12 there will be board exams.
At the end of class 12, students will have credits for various projects and activities, done throughout the secondary stage in their holistic progress card. This will also be linked to their APAAR ID (a unique identification number being allotted to students in the school system to store their credentials in a digital format) and Digi locker, which they can use at any time in the future.
Currently, there are 69 different school boards in India, including state, central, and international ones with approximately 14.8 lakh schools affiliated to these boards catering to around 26.5 crore learners. The study excludes Sanskrit boards, madrasas, and technical boards.
The research analyses the current state of school boards in India across various categories and is aligned with the NCF-SE.
The assessment body conducted multiple regional workshops with the school boards to address the challenges of quality and standardisation. In these workshops, question paper templates (QPT) and an equivalence questionnaire (EQQ) were used to data on academic and administrative standings.
The report assesses equivalence across school boards on three parameters — board establishment, functioning, and membership; provision of facilities, opportunities and resources to learners; and learner assessment and evaluation.
It puts together insights on the current level of equivalence in assessment, curriculum, administration, infrastructure, and inclusiveness, which is based on data voluntarily reported by different boards of school education through equivalence questionnaires (EEQ) and question paper templates (QPTs) developed by PARAKH.
18,000 question papers analysed across 10 school boards as pilot
The insights are based on a pilot study conducted by the standard-setting body on question paper analysis across 10 school education boards last year. The outcomes of the pilot study were shared among the stakeholders upon which a series of regional meetings with the school boards were held between June and August 2023. The pilot study involved the selection of question papers from any three years between 2018 and 2022, excluding the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pilot study comprises of analysis of around 18,000 class 10 question papers across four subject areas — language, mathematics, science, and social studies. Based on the feedback received and its analysis, significant modifications to the template were made. Some of the improvements based on these changes include the inclusion of map and diagram-based questions to add to the reading comprehension-based questions.
The final analysis included an assessment of 10,305 questions across 32 school boards that participated in the study. The extensive analysis of a large number of questions from diverse school boards provided insights into the variability of key question paper characteristics across boards, it said.
Variations in subjects offered by different school boards
Data given in the report shows that in class 10, 38.89% of the school boards have Art/Craft as a compulsory subject in their curriculum while 61.11% of the boards provide Physical Education/Sports/ Yoga as a compulsory subject. 90% per cent of the boards offer skill education as an optional subject in class 10, whereas 9.52% of the boards have made the curricular area compulsory.
Given the figures, the report highlights that the NCF-SE 2023 states that in classes 9 and 10 learners will be given exposure to six vocations (two from each form of work) spread over two years. Thus, making different curricular areas interdependent.
Also, it observed that 40.74% of the boards allow one supplementary/compartment board exam to class 10 students while 29.63% allow two supplementary/compartment board exams. Nearly 22% of the boards allow more than two supplementary/compartment board exams for their learners. However, there are 7.41% of boards do not allow any such option to its students.
“These discrepancies between the boards amount to inequality amongst the learners of the same country and needs to be addressed,” the report stated.
Only 39% of the boards reviewed teacher performance in their affiliated schools. Notably, only 21% of boards indicated that they were involved in development of teaching aids.
Meanwhile, very few boards taught coding, application development and audio-video production. Given the growth in technology, it is imperative that skill courses like cloud computing, AI, machine learning, data science and block technology, among others are inculcated for better future employability of the learners, it said.
The report highlighted that even as the NCF-SE envisages on-demand examinations, data shows that 93% of the boards do not have any provision for the same, which is why high stakes are attributed to year-end board exams by learners. On-demand exams mean students can appear for board exams in subjects they have completed or feel ready for.
In terms of infrastructure, about 39% of the boards indicated that their affiliated schools do not have any books in their libraries which is a matter of concern, the report said. Only 18% of the boards have 200 or fewer books in their affiliated schools.
It was also observed that most school boards lack inclusivity. Only 36% of the boards implemented the 25% reservation policy for learners from the EWS category in their private schools. “This statistic was considered significantly below the expected norm,” it said.
What QPT analysis found
The study found that some of the boards place a significant emphasis on remember/recall-based questions in different subject domains. “A high percentage of recall-based questions highlight the shortcomings in assessment procedures as outlined by the NEP 2020 and the NCF-SE 2023, especially the prevalence of rote or memory-based learning and assessment. It was observed that a few boards lacked creative questions for languages, which underscores the said point,” the report stated.
The findings reveal a significant variation among boards in their approach to question types. About 25% of the boards place more than 50% emphasis on Long Answer questions. One of the boards places more than 60% of their marks on MCQs. Around 12% of the boards emphasise Short Answer questions by more than 50%. Only about 6% of the boards place more than 50% emphasis on Very Short questions.
According to the report, for a couple of school boards, the subject matter experts deemed more than 85% of the questions in languages to be of medium difficulty level, while a few school boards had close to 67% difficult items paired with about 33% easy difficulty level items. “This highlights the stark disparity in the level of difficulty of the question papers resulting in a glaring dissonance in the marks received by learners across boards,” it said.