Is the three language formula at the Grade nine level a good Idea?

When I was given the Ninth class many years back in the year 2009, (at the time of the original post), after teaching English to the eleventh and twelfth for a long time, I came up with some amazing facts. First and foremost, I noticed that the students were not eager about English because of the three-language formula. The upshot is that a student of the ninth class had to opt for three languages in class. The commonly chosen languages were  English, Sanskrit, and Hindi. Out of these, the student was required to pass in any two languages. Thus, if a student passed in Hindi and Sanskrit, and failed in English, he would be considered Promoted. No wonder, that year when I was given tenth class, I noticed that there were quite a few students in class who had got, twenty out of a hundred in English! No wonder these students were not performing well in class. It seems as if our educational system was promoting mediocrity in the interests of mass education! Simply promoting students despite their poor performance in studies is bound to have serious repercussions at a later stage! It boils down to a game of passing the buck! If you pass all the students, you need to provide them with jobs too.

Introducing the three-language formula in the new education policy is bound to create loads of confusion and result in the mediocrity of performance in summative assessments. Any system that imposes a three language formula on its students will have to make necessary tweaks in the promotion system otherwise most of the students will fail their exams. It is a known fact that passing in all three languages at any grade level will become a tough task, especially when the student has to study more than three other subjects till the secondary (10th) level. Imagine having to study Math, Science, Social Studies, English, Hindi and Sanskrit-a total of six subjects! 

Has doing away with written Board exams at the Grade ten level been a good idea?

I personally don’t think doing away with the boards at the tenth class level has been good  for us.We still have to pass through a transition from a system which has been with us for the past many years. Lack of competition has made our students lose their edge in studies.I feel we should have waited for some more time and then reduced the weight age of board exams.Make board exams compulsory, but introduce internal assessment as an important part of board exams.There could be a 50-50% or 60-40% division of the marks for the board exam and the internal assessment.We should not have experimented with the studies of students at the Grade ten level! We shouldn't have gone for mass education at this level! Maybe remove exams at the primary level, but don’t do this at the intermediate level!

Now, students are not serious about reading their lessons because continuous evaluation has ensured that they are able to get through easily. So, it seems the absence of the fear of not doing well in a pen and paper exam such as used to happen earlier has meant that students today do not have very good exam skills.

Today it is October 2013 and when I return to this article I realize how much the decision of doing away with Board Exams the traditional way has caused students to lose their competitive edge! Students have lost their edge in examinations skills, and if there is anything that they are not able to do, then it is the inability to write answers in a term paper. Today students who are promoted to the grade eleven level find it very difficult to develop examination skills to pass their board papers at the grade twelve level. When grade eleven students sit down for their first terminal Summative   exams, they find it very difficult to complete the paper within the prescribed time limit of three hours. Has lack of exposure to competition as provided by Board exams in the past made our students dull and poor in other competitive exams? I guess the answer is yes. Today, our obsession for mass education has somehow taken away the quality that Indian Education once had. Don't you wonder why none of our institutions or even Universities and B-Schools don't figure anywhere in the list of the first two hundred top institutions in the world? I guess in time to  comes things will become worse. The idea behind removing board exams was to reduce stress, but CCA has somehow done the exact opposite with all sorts of activities being formulated to assess "formative" skills in students in a way that is meant to be "continuous"! This has lead to increased stress in teachers who have to prepare all sorts of activities, and for students it is nothing but continuous assessments, continuous tests! Welcome to the twenty-first century, the age of continuous testing!