We need an education system that isn’t held hostage by exams

livemint.com:

Board examinations are among the key problems of Indian education. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 (NCF) confronts this matter head-on, starting with explicitly acknowledging current issues instead of dodging these. Stress caused by board exams among students and their families is the first big issue.

This is driven by a variety of reasons, including: exams marks being seen socially as measure of ‘intrinsic worth’ and believing that they have life-altering effects; the results of these examinations being used for college admissions or sometimes even for jobs later; underperformance on just one day of exams having severe effects; and commercial interests that create artificial competitive pressures so as to make money from coaching and tuition. Second, most board examinations do not achieve their primary purpose, and worse, misguide much educational effort in schools. These exams are supposed to certify competencies attained by students at the end of grades 10 and 12.

Instead, too many mostly test memorization of a huge range of facts. This fundamental misalignment gives a woefully incomplete (at best) or incorrect (at worst) picture of student learning. Third, most test instruments are poorly designed, which leads to unacceptable variations between evaluators and overall inconsistency.

In brief: the validity and reliability of too many of our board exams are poor. Misdirected exam design ends up undermining all aspects of education, from teaching and classroom or school practices to text books, which all tend to focus on facts and memorization, rather than on real learning and achieving competencies and curricular goals. The NCF makes significant changes in board exams to address these issues.