CUET Holds Promise Against Boards Rat Race, but It Has Its Risks

The step is a mixed bag and the possibilities that it offers need to be understood in a nuanced manner.

The UGC recently made it mandatory for all 45 central universities to admit students to their undergraduate programmes on the basis of CUET. 

(Photo: The Quint)

The University Grants Commission (UGC) recently made it mandatory for all 45 central universities to admit students to their undergraduate programmes based on scores obtained in the Central Universities Common Entrance Test (CU-CET), or the Common University Entrance Test (CUET). The test will be conducted by the National Testing Agency. The UGC has also “invited and encouraged” the state and private universities to do the same.

There are some discussions about the desirability and the possible consequences of this major shift of policy. These discussions bring in various perspectives, including federalism, diversity versus uniformity, universities’ autonomy, what is fair and convenient for aspiring candidates, the desirability of consultations as opposed to fiats in promulgating reforms, and so on.

A Mixed Bag

I would not like to touch upon any of these in this brief piece. My attempt here is merely to examine this issue from the perspective of school education and look at its pros and cons.

My sense is that this development is a mixed bag as far as schools go, and the possibilities that it brings with it need to be understood in a nuanced manner. This is important for teachers, curriculum developers and teacher educators to make full use of this moment and bring ‘learning’ back in focus, as opposed to merely ‘cracking examinations’.

It has always been felt that board examinations determine the nature of schooling. Instead of assessing what is learnt, the tendency is to learn what is assessed. A massive and centralised board examination system flattens the whole process of testing, restricting it to a limited range of learning that is amenable to the ‘paper-pencil’ mode. While the process of schooling is inherently capable of facilitating a wide spectrum of learning among students, the board examination, based on written ‘papers’, a large part of which comprises multiple-choice questions, can at best assess just a narrow band of that wide spectrum of learning.

Theoretically, the function of the board examination is to assess comprehensively the entire range of what is learnt at school.

However, in practice, given the constraints of how the examinations are conducted and evaluated, only those aspects of learning that are amenable to being tested through a centralised written examination get assessed.

Smart Examinees, Not Good Learners

Caught in the rat race of ranking based on performance in board examinations, schools tend to coerce students through a transformation from good learners to smart examinees. Their classroom processes, particularly in high school and higher secondary sections, are oriented towards what is likely to be tested in the board examination. The coaching industry acts as an external scaffold in this process.

The board examination has thus been exerting an oppressive influence on the process of learning at school. That it also serves the function of a gatekeeper for regulating entry into higher education reinforces this oppressive influence. For this reason, the board examination has for long been the central fulcrum around which the entire schooling revolves.

This arrangement is so well-established that it has given credence to a tacit but definite assumption that schooling is primarily a social contrivance for sorting and selecting, thus regulating entry into higher education and the privileges that accompany it. School final examination has been not only selecting or rejecting students at the point of entry into higher education, but it has also been sorting students into the various streams of higher education, which are perched on the hierarchy of rungs in the ladder of social and economic stratification.

Since the school final examination is conducted by a remote and impersonal entity called the Board, it has served the purpose of providing a meritocratic validation for what is otherwise clearly a reproduction of inequality in society.

There is, of course, another set of reasons why a school final examination may not be the best instrument for selecting students for higher education. This matter merits a separate essay. But, let me state this starkly and without any elaboration.

Entrance tests are essentially aptitude tests. An attribute of a construct like aptitude is that in a large population, it tends to be normally distributed. An entrance test is supposed to effectively discriminate between those who are high in aptitude and those who are not. A bell-shaped curve will facilitate this.

School final examinations on the other hand are basically achievement tests, which are supposed to be criterion-referenced. In plain language, this means the examination is essentially meant to test how much of what the students were supposed to learn has actually been learnt, or, in other words, how much of what was aimed at has been achieved.

'Inflation of Marks' and High Cut-offs

A good school will ensure that most students learn most of what was aimed at in the curriculum. Thus, it is natural for the distribution of marks or grades to be negatively skewed, that is, the crest of the curve pulled to the right side with its longer tail towards the left. There is likely to be too much bunching of students towards the higher ranges of marks or grades. The ‘inflation of marks’ that we often complain about and the astronomically high cutoffs that it generates is a consequence of this.

School final examination marks/grades are not a fair indicator of aptitude, based on which selection to higher education should be done. It is unfair to discriminate between someone who has scored 98.7 and 98.6, since such differences are, in all probability, due to chance rather than a difference in aptitude.

Learning Process Should Be Separate From Examination

The present initiative on the part of the UGC has changed it all, or so it seems. It holds some promise particularly for the learning process to be disengaged from examination, something educationists have long been arguing for. It potentially releases schools from the burden of engaging in the task of the sorting and selecting function. This is an opportunity for schools to go back to their original objectives – all-around development of students through meaningful, deep, self-propelled and experiential learning.

However, this can happen only if the Board examination, as we understand it today, ceases to be or gets transformed drastically. So long as the centralised board examinations continue to hold sway, the learning process will continue to be oppressed by examinations.

The argument that the CUET will reduce the number of examinations that the students will have to take while applying for admission to higher education is not entirely correct. Tests for admission to IITs, Law and some other professional programmes will still remain. This problem can be addressed only if the CUET assumes the character of the Special Aptitude Test (SAT) and replaces all other examinations, including Board examinations.

But Can CUET Lead to Another Coaching Industry?

Another probable consequence of this development is a proliferation of the coaching industry of the Kota variety. With the school final examination somewhat undermined because of CUCET, it is quite likely that students in many parts of the country may remain just nominally enrolled in schools while attending full-time classes conducted by the coaching industry. Given the unregulated nature of the coaching industry, it is to be seen how it will impact private costs for securing entry into higher education, and how just and fair this system is going to be.

(The author is a former professor at the Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)