This is an apropos to the article “PRIVATE EXAMINATION BOARD: NOT A GOOD IDEA” which was published on Dawn by Noman Ahmed.
I read the fifteen paragraphs of Dawn’s Education page article on the above subject with a sense of irritation and wonder – irritation that of the fifteen paragraphs at least eight had nothing to do with the topic at hand, and wonder that those which did ended by making a case for the private examination board far better than any purported criticism might have intended. The author (I am sorry but I have no idea where his expertise to pass a judgment on the examination system comes from) seems to know extremely well all the reasons why the examination boards of the Government have lost, in his words, “integrity”, “authenticity” and “credibility”.
But nitpicking aside, let me quickly get to the epicenter of error in the whole article, which has the following sentence in the sixth paragraph:
Now that you have a private examination board, it will be free to formulate and prescribe its own syllabus.
I think this a purely gratuitous supposition because the ‘well known university’ has no mandate to change or meddle with the curriculum. The author (whose animosity against the US seems to be deeper than his rudimentary understanding of education) seems to have thought that the teaching process and the testing process are both inevitable continua of a curriculum, whereas practitioners in the field know that you can have the best taught students fail an invalid exam.
Let me spell out this thinking in a little more detail. Since the issue is complex, I will deal with it under separate headings.
1. The Service to Justice
In the literature on testing, two of the first terms to be defined are reliability and validity. An exam must be both reliable and valid, which means it must be a fair assessment of the learner’s knowledge. No matter what grade a learner has actually received, it has been my experience both as examiner and educator that learners of whatever age have always been happy when the grade they received reflected their actual performance in the test. A high grade for poor performance was in the learner’s eye just as ignoble as a low grade for hard work. This betokens an innate quest for justice that is the hallmark of our humanity.
Turning to the national examination boards, one sadly notes that this is not true. In a previous article published on this page I had mentioned the scale of corruption, and I quote:
From Qabza groups who ensure examination centres of their choice to proxy examination sitters, to the leakage of papers a week, a day, the night before, to the widespread arbitrariness in checking, to the correct answers called out on a microphone from a van outside the examination centre, to the clerk bribed to enter the marks ‘incorrectly’ on the marks sheets (35 written as 53) — the catalogue of ignominy goes on.
Against this, the writer’s naïve ideas of examination board reform seem quite superficial, if not laughable.
I am convinced that there are parents in the country who would like their children to be assessed correctly and to get an idea of their standing vis-à-vis an international benchmark of children of similar ages in other countries of the world. I am also convinced that since the present system of exams has the above problems, setting them right is not a viable option.
I am convinced that a private examination board which is dedicated to a proper model of testing can and will take exams which will not just be tests of rote learning but cognitive skills of the students at the Matric and HSC level, and that none who wish to appear in these exams will be compelled to abstain from the public board examination.
2. A Parallel Exam?
The last sentence above may make readers think that I am advocating here a parallel system in which students, even if by their own choice, will appear in two exams, i.e. public and private boards. This is true, and while some people may wring their hands at such a situation, I would simply like to point out that there already is a parallel system in place. Those who appear in the ‘O’ Level exams also appear in the Matric exams, and I am not even talking about the Madressah exams which are equivalent to the B.A., M.A. by State permission.
And how can we disregard the incredible shamelessness with which the public examinations’ results are not considered valid and the IBA is asked to conduct professional exams in a blatant display of a parallel system? If this is not an explicit admission of the failure of the public examination board, I do not what it is.
3. Teaching/Testing Interface
The gratuitous remarks against the private university and US Embassy (sic) by bringing in the question of curriculum is the central point which is the relationship between teaching and testing. The curriculum is not the issue. I have been told by those who know that the Additional Maths textbook of the Sindh Textbook Board is comparable with any other in the world. No, my understanding of the private examination board is that they will set a pattern of questions that cannot be answered by rote learning. The mafia of the ‘Solved Papers’ that has caused such a huge derailment of proper teaching will be challenged right here. The Private Exam paper can have cognitively demanding questions and even, I assume, task based questions because this is the direction most reliable and valid tests have taken worldwide.
This leads us to a consideration of what is known in testing literature as the ‘backwash effect’. Briefly it means the effect of testing on teaching. We know that the spectrum of teaching is larger than the possibilities of testing. Students who do not allow the teacher to move from the syllabus by a syllable have become that way due to the downgrading of standards in education. When a teacher narrated the plot of one of Shakespeare’s plays as an illustration to the course text, some students asked, “Is this coming in the exam?” When they were told, ‘No, but isn’t it interesting?’ they replied curtly, ‘No it is not. Do not waste our time.’ This then is the worst example of the ‘backwash’ effect when teaching is totally governed by the testing.
4. From Gujranwala to Quetta
Even if the above aspects of the problems are not enough to make the case for the private board, the following anecdote must raise the chills down one’s education spine – at least it does in mine.
A student appeared in the Gujranwala Board and got Third Division marks. When the same student two months later appeared in the Quetta Board exam, he got First Division marks. This can mean two things. Either the lad became remarkably intelligent in just two months or there is no comparability between the papers, checking standards and other parameters between two boards in the same country. Consider the criminal anomaly of the absence of a timetable in the country. How was it possible that an exam conducted in one province had literally no connection with the timings, dates, sequence in another part of the country? Granted that education is a provincial subject but then I have another question: When did any board release the dates of exams, results, admissions a year in advance – a courtesy which I believe this nation owes to its young?
Those who wish to set right such state of affairs are welcome to suggest a possible starting point. For now, a private examination board that adopts the curriculum as it is, sets intelligent question papers on it, has fixed dates for the exams and announcement of the results is not a bad idea.
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Here is the full article:
A couple of weeks ago a memorandum of understanding was signed between a well-known private university and the US Embassy under which the latter would provide the institution $ 4.5 million to set up a private examination board for secondary and higher secondary education. This initiative became possible only after the promulgation of an ordinance by the president of Pakistan specifically for this purpose.
The grant has been given to a sector which is rapidly transforming itself into a market-driven enterprise and which has immense potential for further commercialization. Capitalizing on this potential is only possible when education in the public sector is thoroughly discredited and undermined. And those who want to set up their own education boards and those who finance them are only too l lucky because we have a government which wants to do just that.
While admitting the failure of her own ministry, federal education minister Zubeida Jalal termed the creation of such boards as the “logical” response of the government to raise standards in secondary and higher secondary schooling. Not long ago, the task for introducing (read bulldozing) reforms in the management structure of public sector universities was initiated. The effort was made possible only with technical and financial assistance of a major international financial institution.
The taskforce on higher education reform was headed by chiefs of two large private institutions – one of which has now been given the money by the Americans. The fact is that without the reforms suggested by the taskforce the private institution would not have gotten permission for setting up its own private examination board. And given that the head of the taskforce also happens to be the head of the institution which got the permission for the examining board, the question of conflict of interest arises. Is it ethical or fair for a higher education institution to benefit because its chief also happens to head the government’s policymaking initiative on reforming higher education?
While the much-contested Model University Ordinance has yet to be introduced before parliament, and while the government repeatedly says that it is open to suggestions for modifying/amending it, the fact is that pressure is mounting on the managements of public universities to voluntarily adopt its provisions. Now the same is going to happen in the case of secondary and higher secondary institutions. By repeatedly citing pre-university education as a primary reason for the overall decline in educational standards, room has been made for a venture such as this one to allow entrepreneurship in education.
The present regime has mindlessly extended its full support to the creation of examination boards in the private sector. This is wrong and misguided because it means that the government is abdicating one of its primary responsibilities in the field of education: to have in a place a credible and affordable system of examination and academic assessment of students enrolled in secondary and higher secondary schools and colleges. Now that you have a private examination board, it will be free to formulate and prescribe its own syllabus.
The focus of the curriculum will be to produce graduates (matriculates or intermediates) who will adhere to the principles of free market capitalism espoused by the United States, students who will become, so to speak, local followers of Uncle Sam and all his policies. Any capacity for intellectual dissent against the international status quo – with the west firmly in command and its policies and ideologies ruling the rest of the world – will be thus nipped in the bud. It is also apparent that since those who pass through this system will receive the best possible incentives, it will in due course of time automatically attract more and more pupils to its fold.
The system of education is already a cause of the widening social divide in the country. The financially backward and downtrodden tend to end up in seminaries with very few opportunities to move ahead in life. Those in the lower middle-class can only afford to send their children to government schools or institutions governed and run under the supervision of local boards. Those who graduate from such schools have to wage a continuous struggle to get a decent result in the matric and inter exams. And those who fail to pass even these qualifications have very few options because almost every job or higher education institution within Pakistan requires at least an intermediate or matriculation certificate.
Students from such backgrounds are not able to hire private tutors, have limited comprehension of the English language, and are often busy doing so many things other than studying (for example, doing odd jobs to help finance their family) that they hardly have a realistic chance of doing well academically. Students from higher income groups have the opportunity of better schooling and the option to either sit for examinations from a local board or from a foreign university.
However, once the private examination board idea catches on, it will the government schools – the ones with students from disadvantaged backgrounds – who will have to change to the new system. Most private schools for their part anyway have switched to the O and A level system. However, students in the government schools which eventually switch to private exam boards might have to make major adjustments, not just in terms of the altered syllabus but also because the private boards will end up charging more in examination fees.
Those who advocate such reforms in the education sector conveniently forget that a good market functions only if there is fair competition and if all market players have access to the same kind of opportunities. The creation of this particular examination board goes against the latter principle.
In the present circumstances, the sanction by the government to the private institution to operate the private exam board can be seen as a favour because local educational institutions were not even consulted. Notwithstanding the state of decay of our educational system, the country has dozens of reputable institutions with long histories and enviable records of accomplishment that would merit them being sanctioned their own independent examination systems. But the government never gave them such concessions.
This is not to say that our local government-run examination boards are any better. With a few exceptions, most have sharply deteriorated in performance over the years.
The syllabuses used are often obsolete and flawed, there is no way of checking student attendance in regular classes, and exam procedures are tedious and outdated and test only memorizing skills. Besides this, the system cannot guarantee integrity of the results achieved because cases of cheating and papers being leaked are reported almost every year. There is also no guarantee about the marking, and candidates or teachers often have no idea of the marking scheme, if indeed there is one. In fact, the recent example of giving grace marks in Sindh to students who sat for intermediate exams from 1999 to 2002 is a good example of just how deficient and mismanaged the whole system is.
However, the solution to this is not to allow examination boards in the private sector but to reform those that already exist. The government-run boards need substantial reforms and the government should address this issue instead of trying to bypass them by issuing institution-specific ordinances. Creating parallel options (a good analogy might be the proposed creation of parallel courts or judicial system, which was roundly criticized) will quicken the demise of the government-run examination boards.
Several steps can be considered towards improving the secondary and higher secondary examination boards. One, the curriculums currently subscribed should be reviewed by an independent body of academic experts. The review should be done from the standpoint of the objectives laid down for each tier and the level of educational attainment expected from students. Each board may undertake this exercise on its own initiative.
Two, the boards should formulate and adopt a set of performance indicators to allow them to gauge the performance of schools whose students sit for their (the boards’) examinations. The boards will have to ensure that the schools adhere to the code of working prescribed for them and that the curriculum is followed with a focus on attaining academic excellence.
Three, the present system and procedure of examination should be reviewed from the perspective of making it more effective in assessing academic achievement. The analytical, comprehension and related skills of students should be tested, not their ability to memorize a book in a matter of days. The examination must be conducted in a manner so that cheating is minimized and that their results have some authenticity and credibility.
Four, the private schools should be monitored to ensure that if they charge high fees then the quality of teaching that they impart also improves. And five, those government schools who do very well and prove themselves to be models, their experiences and achievements should be analyzed and documented so that other institutions might be able to replicate them.