The government has asked CBSE to work out an alternative framework and the board has constituted a 13-member committee to come up with an objective criteria for assessment of Class XII students.

Nonetheless, whatever criteria CBSE committee comes up with, it will be much inferior to a national exam. And if universities decide to award admissions based on that, heartbreaks and complaints are certain.

While we can’t do much now, the preparations for 2022 should begin in earnest. For this, one proposes that focus should be on doing away with the national CBSE exams altogether which is an outdated system of assessing one’s abilities. These exams lost their utility long back and should now be replaced with a better system that is tougher but not burdensome.

This is perfectly in sync with the changes proposed by the National Education Policy (NEP) last year. It had proposed to give flexibility in choosing courses especially for students in Class IX to XII.

Now, if the government decides to do away with the CBSE board exams (which seems impossible as this is not even on the government’s consideration), the alternative to evaluate students at national level to get admissions in central universities can be via subject-specific 'olympiads'.

To sum up, it doesn’t matter if CBSE board exams are cancelled forever. Standardised specialised tests for individual subjects can easily replace the old system provided that higher education institutes also give admissions based on those scores.

#BoardExams #NationalTests #HigherEducation

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