|
Education Plus
Entrance test reforms will have to wait
|
There has been a consensus on the creation of a question bank and on giving equal weightage to marks scored in the qualifying and the entrance examinations. G.MAHADEVAN says the question is how to bring marks in various syllabi streams on an equal footing.
|
One more year: A file photo of a candidate and her parent at an entrance exam centre in Kochi.
As tens of thousands of would-be engineers and doctors in the State are gearing up to clear the Kerala Engineering, Architecture and Medical (KEAM) entrance examinations, a final picture of the nature of this hurdle they face is yet to emerge.
A seven-member committee set up by the State government to suggest examination reforms is yet to put pen to paper to give shape to its report. One thing seems increasingly clear — reforms are highly unlikely this year.
Education Minister M.A. Baby said as much to The Hindu- EducationPlus when asked about the unfinished business of reforming the entrance examinations.
“The committee’s report is expected any time now. Once we get the report, we will start the process of seeing how the recommendations can be put into practice,” he said.
“However, we have to give some cooling-off time for students to internalise reforms. So, it is highly unlikely that such reforms will be implemented this year. Next year’s entrance examinations will feature these reforms.”
But why did it take this long for the committee to come up with its recommendations? Was it that the recommendations were complex enough to merit the delay or did other reasons such as bureaucratic hurdles impede the smooth functioning of the committee. The recommendations on which the panel members have arrived at a consensus seem straightforward enough.
One is the creation of a question bank for preparing the question papers. The committee members agreed, over the course of their deliberations spread over many months, that the process of setting up the bank should be transparent, that questions should be graded according to their difficulty level and that the question papers should be in English and Malayalam.
Another point on which the committee has reached an agreement is that equal “weightage” should be given to marks scored in the qualifying and the entrance examinations.
This covers about 90 per cent of the reforms that the committee has in mind. So, why the delay?
Bureaucratic delay
A major reason is bureaucratic in nature. As long as Chief Secretary P.J. Thomas had been Principal Secretary, Higher Education, and convener of the committee, things proceeded in a relatively consistent manner. Once Mr. Thomas became Chief Secretary and continued to be convener, things began to stagnate as he could not find time to get the committee members together. Once the mantle of convener passed to Thomas Abraham, Secretary, Higher Education, the committee’s pace picked up.
Though the committee agreed in principle on giving sufficient “weightage” to the marks scored in the qualifying examination, there was this question of how to bring together on one platform students who passed out of syllabi streams of the Indian Council of Secondary Education, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the State directorates of Higher Secondary and Vocational Higher Secondary Education.
The marks scored in these examinations are so varied that there needs to be an “equivalency formula” to dovetail the marks into the assessment parameters for preparing the entrance rank list.
R.V.G. Menon, committee member and activist of the Kerala Sasthra Sahitya Parishat, says a tested mathematical formula is there to do this comparison.
“We can take the standard deviation and the mean from one group of participants and re-map another group. But here, we are not talking about the same population of students. Those writing the CBSE [examinations] cannot be classified directly along with those appearing for the Vocational Higher Secondary Examination, which is also a qualifying examination for the entrance,” he says.
“To prepare and test the formula, we need to take sample populations, run case studies and see whether our assumptions are true. To run these tests we need data from the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations.”
On this front too, the functioning of the committee has left much to be desired. Some panel members who thought they could operate via emails found, to their consternation, that government committees function better in the “file-meeting-further meetings” mode. The understaffed office of the Commissioner of Entrance Examinations is in no position to add socio-economic research to its “to-do list.”
Mr. Menon says the committee needs two more months to run the data, if any, supplied by the commissioner’s office and finalise the formula for bringing together on one platform students from various syllabi. Only then can any report be submitted. In other words, the committee’s report may not get finalised in a timeframe that the Education Minister appears to have in mind.
The finalisation of the formula is important in another respect. While Kerala has looked to reform its entrance examination, Tamil Nadu has done away with the test. The Tamil Nadu High Court upheld the government’s move and the Supreme Court is now seized of the matter. The question is, what if the Supreme Court okays the scrapping of the test? What if somebody in Kerala too files a case for abolishing the entrance examination in the State?
In such a scenario, this equivalency formula will, perhaps, form the prime factor for ensuring that students from various syllabi get an equitable chance at getting admissions.
As Mr. Menon points out, only a small percentage of students in Tamil Nadu who write the entrance examinations are from syllabi other than the State syllabi. In Kerala, this is not the case at all, he says.
B.Ed. entrance
There is an entrance examination in Kerala which is being sought to be abolished by the office of the commissioner. In fact, it is two months now that the commissioner has submitted a report to the Secretary, Higher Education, asking that the entrance examination for B.Ed. courses be done away with. The government is reportedly studying this proposal.
The commissioner has reportedly pointed out in his report that the number of seats for the B.Ed. programme across the State and the number of aspirants are, roughly, the same.
This, the report argues, by itself makes an entrance examination and a selection procedure meaningless. (In 2007, 27,000 candidates applied for the examination. There are 21,000 seats in the State for this course, excluding the seats in the B.Ed. colleges of various universities. Of the 27,000-odd applicants, 1,500 did not turn up for the test and the applications of 1,700 were rejected for various reasons.)
Another major reason why the commissioner does not want to conduct the B.Ed. entrance examination is lack of adequate staff.
The commissioner has also pointed out that admissions to B.Ed. courses now take place in two ways — from the entrance rank list and from the list prepared by each university. The latter list is prepared on the basis of the marks scored in the qualifying examinations. So, why have an entrance examination at all?
In the case of the B.Ed. entrance examination too, it remains to be seen if there will be any change in the nature of the examination this year.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
|
