With the spectre of PISA 2009 when Indian 15-year-olds were ranked second last from among 74 participating countries looming in the background, at the last minute the BJP government at the Centre withdrew India’s participation in PISA 2022, which was written by 690,000 students from 81 countries writes Dilip Thakore There was a growing sense of inevitability about it. At the last minute India withdrew from the transnational PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 2022, results of which were declared on December 5, 2023. Organised by the Directorate of Education and Skills of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development), a group of developed industrial countries, PISA 2022 tested the capabilities of 15-year-olds representing over 80 countries around the world in reading, science and maths through a common exam. Around 690,000 students from 81 participating countries wrote PISA 2022. The Indian contingent of students was MIA (missing in action). For several years until the millennium year, the Directorate of Education within OECD used to measure the education progress of countries using the metric of average years of schooling of 15-year-olds. But this was found to be unsatisfactory because education standards differed in countries. Therefore in the new millennium, the Directorate devised a common test to measure the reading, maths and science attainments of high school children and rank countries according to outcomes. Since then, PISA, held every three years, has acquired incremental international popularity. In 2009 shortly after the Congress-led UPA government was re-elected to power at the Centre, Union HRD (education) minister Kapil Sibal, perhaps enthused by the large number of students being awarded 95 percent-plus average scores in class X and XII school-leaving exams conducted by India’s 33 examination boards (including the national CBSE and CISCE), ordered India’s participation in PISA 2009. India’s representative batch of 5,000 15-year-olds selected from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh — reputedly India’s most educationally advanced states — was ranked #73, higher than only one country, Kyrgyzstan (pop. 6 million). When the results of PISA 2009 were released, the plain truth that our K-12 education system is hopelessly obsolete and addicted to rote learning and memorization pedagogies became manifest. PISA tests the comprehension, critical thinking and knowledge application skills of high schoolers. With egg on its face as media across the country headlined the pathetic performance of the India cohort of 5,000 students in PISA 2009, India skipped PISA 2012 and 2015. The then UPA government blamed ‘out of context’ questions for boycotting PISA. However in 2015, the Union government introduced its own National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted by NCERT (National Council for Educational Research & Training), an autonomous subsidiary of the Union education ministry. In NAS 2015 over a period of five months, 277,416 class X students of 7,216 schools affiliated with two pan-India and 31 state examination boards were administered “standardised and context-free objective tests using uniform tools” in five subjects (English, maths, science, social science and the dominant state language) by the Delhi-based NCERT. The outcome of NAS 2015 inspired…
