The discerning among the rising number of regular readers of this publication are likely to have noticed that during the past few months, a searchlight has increasingly been focused on school examination boards and the role they play in syllabus development and design.
This is because in the light of authoritative reports highlighting declining learning outcomes in primary, secondary and higher education countrywide, awareness is dawning that what children study is perhaps as important as how well they study it. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the phenomenon of declining learning outcomes across the education spectrum is rooted in indifferent syllabus and curriculum design in the country’s 33 school examination boards, including the HRD ministry-controlled Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the autonomous Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE).
This realisation prompted a cover feature on CISCE in June after a National Achievement Survey 2015 commissioned by the HRD ministry and released in March this year, revealed that class X students of CISCE-affiliated schools outperformed their peers in CBSE and state board schools in standardised and context-free objective tests measuring unprepared learning outcomes. However, it’s pertinent to note that students of CISCE-affiliated schools were the best of a bad lot. The average score of a sizeable sample batch of 277,416 class X students of 7,216 schools countrywide tested in five subjects — English, maths, science, social science and the dominant state language — was below the pass mark (50 percent) in all subjects except dominant state language. Quite clearly, the syllabuses and exams designed by the country’s 33 examinations boards, which encourage rote learning and reward memorisation, are unsuitable for 21st century learning.
Rising awareness of this blindspot of Indian educationists and school examination board administrators led your editors to investigate the organisational culture, systems, processes and modus operandi of the UK-based Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) board, the world’s largest school-leaving exams board which has over 10,000 schools in 160 countries affiliated with it, and which is signing up almost two schools worldwide every day. This necessitated a visit to CIE’s high-security head office at 1, Hills Road, Cambridge (UK) in July. Our cover story in this issue explains why CIE, which has revived its ancient ties with India in the new millennium, is the world’s largest and most popular transnational school examinations board.
And in our 30-page special report feature (divided into two disparate sections to reduce reader fatigue), we present a pictorial essay of the two-day EducationWorld India School Rankings Awards 2016 staged in Gurgaon (Delhi NCR) on September 23-24. We believe this was the largest gathering of trustees, promoters, principals and teachers of the country’s most admired schools in Indian history.
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