Assign 40% weightage to Class 12 exam in final result; have ‘on-demand exams’: NCERT PARAKH report

NEW DELHI: PARAKH, a unit of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), has recommended that the state and private examination boards across the country move towards “on-demand examinations” and have a separate cadre of experts for preparing question papers. It has also recommended considering a student’s performance in Classes 9-11 for the final Class 12 report card.

NCERT’s Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development (PARAKH full form), which is tasked with framing guidelines to bring “equivalence” among the 69 school boards in India including the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the state boards, released the draft report on Establishing Equivalence Across Education Boards released on Monday.

The broader guidelines in the report say that state and private school boards need to align themselves with the recommendations of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2023 to attain “equivalence”.

The report has recommended that state boards move towards “on-demand examinations”, allowing students to ask for examinations when they are ready, and provide at least two supplementary or compartment examinations for students who have failed exams.

The boards will need to develop separate question banks for these on-demand examinations and create a framework to “balance the difficulty levels of questions”.

A pilot study conducted by PARAKH among 32 school boards found that there is a large variance in difficulty levels of questions among different state boards.

“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 33% easy difficulty 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,” the report says.

It has also asked for boards to prepare clear guidelines for evaluators and bring “digital techniques” to ensure that there is less variability in evaluations. Boards are also advised to come up with “foolproof mechanisms” to prevent question paper leaks and cheating in examinations.

Classes 9-12 results for final marks

PARAKH has also recommended distributing weightage for the final Class 12 results in the following pattern:

• Class 9: 15%
• Class 10: 20%
• Class 11: 25%
• Class 12: 40%

For Classes 9 to 12, PARAKH has proposed giving much more weightage to internal marks from Class 9 to a gradual increase in the weightage to the board exams by Class 12.

For Class 9, internal assessments, called formative assessments, will have 70% weightage, with the final exams, called summative assessments, getting 30% weightage. In class 10, the weightage for formative assessments and summative assessments will be 50% each.

In Class 11, the weightage for summative assessments will increase to 60% with formative assessments assigned 40% weightage. In Class 12, summative assessments will hold 70% weightage with formative assessments carrying 30% weightage.

Students in Classes 10 to 12 will be required to complete at least 4 credits through online platforms such as the education ministry’s NPTEL or SWAYAM.

School board practices

The report also noted a “dissonance” between school boards and the recommendations in the NEP 2020.

PARAKH, which conducted a self-report survey, also found that only 39% out of 32 participating boards reviewed teacher performance in their affiliated schools. Additionally, only 36% of the school boards reviewed pedagogical practices for children with special needs and only 50% reviewed student attendance and infrastructure

It noted that only 9.5% of boards have made skill education compulsory despite the NEP 2020 directing schools to provide students with “exposure to six vocations” in Classes 9 and 10. It also said that only 36% of boards reported that their schools implemented the 25% reservation policy for economically weaker sections (EWS) as per the Right to Education Act.