Four years after the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation schema was adopted with surprising alacrity by the Central Board of Secondary Education and introduced in all 14,358 CBSE-affiliated schools, the CCE experiment is floundering in a sea of confusion with school principals and teachers struggling to switch from the traditional examination system. Summiya Yasmeen reports Although on the surface all seems calm and business as usual within India’s 1.40 million primary-secondary schools (routine tragedies such as the poisoned mid-day meal horror in Bihar which snuffed out the lives of 23 children, cruel and unusual corporal punishment, child murder, suicides etc are quickly forgotten), the four years past have been a period of great upheaval in school education countrywide. The historic Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, over a decade in the works, became law on April 1, 2010; the world’s largest school mid-day meal programme covering 120 million children is operational; the GER (gross enrolment ratio) in primary education is above 98 percent for boys and girls. And perhaps for the first time since independence, pedagogy and learning outcomes in K-12 education are receiving government and academic attention. In July 2009, former Union human resource development (HRD) minister Kapil Sibal, fresh from the Congress-led UPA-II coalition’s triumphant return to power at the Centre for a second consecutive term, announced a slew of reforms in school education to reduce examination stress and associated anxiety. These reforms were quickly adopted by the HRD ministry-affiliated Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — the largest pan-India school leaving examinations board with 14,358 of the country’s top-ranked private and government primary-secondaries affiliated with it. These liberal initiatives made the class X board exam optional and introduced a new assessment schema — the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system — to replace the ‘sudden death’ examination which assessed students’ capabilities in a final exam. Since then, while Sibal has migrated to the Union telecom ministry, the managements, principals and teachers of the 14,000-plus CBSE schools, comprising a mix of private sector and Central government-owned (Kendriya Vidyalaya and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya) institutions with an aggregate enrolment of 12 million students, have silently been grappling with implementing the ill-considered exam-ination reforms mandated by the former HRD minister and readily-compliant CBSE. Educationists and academics monitoring the country’s glacial education scene are surprised — even astonished — by the alacrity with which the ‘autonomous’ CBSE responded to Sibal’s proposal to introduce CCE. In July-August focus groups comprising parents, teachers, principals and students were hurriedly heard and CCE was “introduced” in all affiliated schools from class I-X through a circular dated September 20, 2009. Four years on, the CCE experiment is floundering in a sea of confusion with school principals and teachers — who were neither consulted nor adequately trained — struggling to switch from the traditional exam system to a radically new form of assessment and evaluation, under which students are continuously appraised through non-stressful progress evaluation methodologies. Typically, neither Union HRD minister Dr. Pallam Raju nor CBSE chairman…
