Right now an estimated 23 million class X and XII students across the country are in the final stages of preparing for their school-leaving board exams which will be held countrywide this month. Although a small but growing fraternity of enlightened parents do their best to reduce examination stress that children routinely suffer in this season, there’s no escaping the reality that high percentage averages (aka grades) in board exams — particularly in the class XII boards — determine children’s higher education destinations, career prospects and arguably their life trajectory.
While grades obtained in board exams may not be of vital significance for students aspiring to enter professional colleges – engineering, medicine, architecture etc — because they conduct separate entrance exams (which has spawned a Rs.30,000 crore per annum test prep or coaching classes industry), high grades are crucial to school-leavers aspiring to enter any of the country’s 21,000 arts, science and commerce undergraduate colleges.
Moreover since India’s 34,908 colleges and 700 universities are small by global standards and can accommodate only 18 percent of youth in the age group 18-24 (cf. 28 percent in China and almost 80 percent in the US), managements of the country’s top-ranked undergraduate colleges are obliged to demand excellent performance — averages of 95-99 percent — in school-leaving board exams as the precondition of admission. Hence the severe pressure on class X and XII children to slog hard and maximise grades.
Although government and aided colleges are obliged to give equal weightage to the certification of all 34 school boards, it’s common knowledge that the pan-India Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and offshore Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) and International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) constitute the premier league of school boards, because the country’s top-ranked schools are affiliated with one or more of them. For the first time, the differing education philosophies, cultures and objectives of these premier league boards are examined in our cover story.
April 1 is the fourth anniversary of the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) which became operational on April 1, 2010. The Act makes it mandatory for the State to provide free and compulsory education to all children aged 6-14 years, and prescribes minimum infrastructure and teacher-pupil ratios for schools countrywide. Reliable reports indicate that 92 percent of the country’s 1.30 million officially ‘recognised’ and 400,000 unrecognised budget schools are non-compliant with the requirements of the RTE Act. Against this grim backdrop, our managing editor Summiya Yasmeen has filed an absorbing and revealing progress report on the Act.
In addition to these lead features, there’s much more in this news, features and opinions-packed issue of the new-look EW. Feedback welcome!
