Board Exams... Whats the use???

Recently our HRD Minister came out with a maverick kind of an idea of scrapping the much hyped class tenth board exams. The logic he gives is also very sound. Board exams do create a lot of stress, strain and pressure that too not only on the students but on their family as well.

Indeed I guess no one will disagree on this fact that the board exams create a racket if nothing more. The first thing anyone says seeing a class tenth student relaxing or playing, “Boards hain is baar.... dhang se padhai kar lo.” (You have your board exams this year, study properly.) I myself bravely faced this dialogue at least a million times in that one year.

The school also puts a lot of pressure on the students with extra classes becoming more regular than the regular classes. I clearly remember that I wrote 6 full length exams that year before the final board exams, while in normal classes we wrote just the half yearly’s before the finals.

The year in which any one kid in the family is having board exams, the whole family observes and follows a strict schedule with substantially reduced outings, from frequent weekend getaways to only a flying visit (that to by just a few people from the family) for the urgent outstation work.

So what is it that makes class tenth board exams so important? They are just like the other final exams that each student has been appearing for in the past nine years of their academic career. There is only a minor alteration that in this case the exams are held in different buildings or schools, and are not corrected by your class teacher and finally the mark sheet that is issued after this exam acts as a date of birth proof for your all future uses. This is what board exams are to the students who take it.

But the major stake holders or the affected parties in these board exams surprisingly are neither the students who take the exam nor the various boards that organize or conduct these exams. The people or bodies that are most affected by the results are schools and coaching centers.

For schools and coaching institutes it is the most important single quantifiable KPI (Key Performance Indicator). For any given school, one board exam can produce a huge amount of data on which the performance can be tracked. Be it number of distinctions, score of the batch topper, average score of all the students, to number of compartments and number of students failed in the exams. The success of any school is governed by these factors more than any other. Same is the case with coaching institutes; their overall success is totally based on the kind of magic figures their students produce.

The level of hype amongst the common people is also planted by these organizations only, by publishing full page advertisements of the successful candidates. Earlier in 90’s when 70-75% score was considered as a good score, today even 90% is just an average score.

These schools and coaching institutes blow the whole issue out of proportion and create undue pressure on the kids. With the growth of India and opening up of more and more private schools and coaching centers, things are surely going out of hands. The stress was way too low till these private institutes came into the picture. An irreparable damage has been done to the education system of the country with the focus shifting from learning to scoring marks, with the amount of focus on marks, the form of these students continue even in higher studies, thus they turn out to be excellent scorers in all the exams and toppers in all international universities.

This is the reason why Indians had been constantly excelling in the service oriented jobs but still very few of us actually turn out to be the pioneers in the path breaking new fields. In the fields where there are no written rules or processes, we actually turn out to be the back benchers or just blind followers of the west.

So even when I feel the idea of scrapping the board exams will actually help the Indian education and growth in the long term, but I also feel that the flourishing education industry will never let it happen, as this will take a huge money making opportunity away from them.