Pointing the way for a major change

Updated on: Wednesday, October 13, 2010

University examinations in Kerala are today mostly administrative exercises. The academic component of examinations should be refurbished through clearly specified goals of learning, well laid out methods of assessing what has been learnt, and innovations in the way examinations are administered. These, in essence, are the conclusions of the Jacob Tharu Committee on Examination Reforms, which submitted its report to the Kerala State Higher Education Council last week. The report can be accessed at the website www.kshec.kerala.gov.in.

Embedded in the seemingly obvious statements in the report about the examination system in Kerala — couched though they are in educational jargon — are powerful indictments of the examination system in the State. This critique inexorably leads to the committee's recommendations which, if implemented in their true spirit — would add punch to the newly-restructured degree courses in Kerala.

Examinations have an administrative side and an academic side. Over time, however, they have come to mean more of the former and very little of the latter, the report laments. The need for secrecy, uniformity, the need to adhere to a time table…, all these have eclipsed the fact that the nature of questions have not changed over many decades. This, the report says, is because the Boards of Study (BoS) concerned have failed to lay out a precise statement of purpose for the syllabi they craft.

This should change. From now on, a BoS should clearly state what they expect a student to learn from a syllabus and what are the outcomes that they wish to test at the end of a course.

“The important principle here is that there should be a means of communication between the syllabus framers and those concerned with assessment,” the report stresses. Translated, this means a radical attitudinal overhaul of these academic bodies and a rewrite of university rules governing their functioning. The effectiveness of all the other recommendations of the committee depends on this overhaul which is easier said than done. Will the HEC be able to convince all universities in the State that such a makeover is long overdue?

Even as it welcomes the 25 per cent weight given to internal assessment in the restructured degree programmes, the committee makes it clear that the incomplete development and articulation of “relevant and systematic schemes” of internal assessment (IA) suited for each course and for different levels of students has led to “adherence to form” and “trivialisation of substance,” in colleges. Teachers lack orientation and support by way of clear schemes, the report points out.

As a solution, the committee recommends that teachers be given the freedom to choose the mode of IA most suited to their course. Moreover, a rational system of integrating the grades for IA and those scored in the external examination needs to be put in place. To put these recommendations into practice the HEC and the universities would have to do a lot more by way of orienting teachers to carry out meaningful IA practices and to keep them posted about the latest thinking around the world on this front. The critical nuts-and-bolts reforms suggested by the committee relate to the setting of question papers. Why not allow a team of setters to craft one question paper, each of them setting out one part? Why not, in other words, a modular question paper, now that “inter-disciplinary” is the new mantra of higher education? Further, why not draw such questions from a question bank which, again, is created in a collaborate mode?

The answer paper too should be overhauled, the Tharu committee says, there should be separate booklets for answering different types of questions. These booklets can then be valued by a team of teachers. And yes, students must be allowed to carry pre-specified material into the examination hall — a ‘limited' version of the open-book examination. Now, these are recommendations which any university can decide to implement almost immediately.

IT@School

The success of the IT@School initiative has so impressed the Tharu committee that it has recommended that this programme be extended to colleges so that higher education in the State can be IT-enabled. Such a move would not be a day too soon as the IT@School programme is poised to move from IT-enabled learning to IT-embedded learning. The ‘good practices' of this programme can with minimum modifications be extrapolated on to the college network.

Yet another recommendation that the State can recommend with minimum difficulty and investment is the on-camera conduct of examinations. The committee has proposed that all examination-related activities — the opening of the question paper packet, their distribution, the actual examination and the final packing of the answer scripts — be recorded to ensure transparency.

The committee has also turned the spotlight on a hitherto non-existent academic practice in Kerala; the organised analysis of examination and assessment data to gauge the effectiveness of teaching, learning and examination practices. Such analyses could well lead to more scientific procedures, the report points out.

The Tharu committee's report will now be subject to academic scrutiny. The usefulness and impact of these recommendations will depend on the speed with which they are implemented — after modifications, if any — in Kerala's higher education sector. The extension of such reforms to the school education sector is also long overdue.

Pointing the way for a major change

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