The Society for Advancement of Education (SAHE) recently held a seminar in Islamabad to present and discuss the findings of a study that it has conducted on the Punjab Examination Commission (PEC). PEC conducts grade 5 and 8 examinations across the province of Punjab for all school-going children in these grades, irrespective of whether they are enrolled in private or public schools. However, as usual the elite schools have, for the moment, been excused from having to present their students for these examinations. The study took a detailed look at the way examinations are set, how they are conducted and marked, and how the results are reported, with the aim of trying to see where any/some shortfalls are and how the process can be improved. It does not come as a surprise to see that, in the conduct of examinations on the scale we are talking about, there are things that can be done to improve the whole exercise. Examination questions need to be piloted, psychometricians need to be employed to ensure better cognitive testing, there have to be an adequate number of test centres, facilities at these centres have to be good, two examinations a day is too much, grading should be done quickly (if feedback is to be of any value) but it has to be fair as well, and examination results have to be disseminated widely to allow for results to form an effective feedback loop to teaching and teacher training.
The SAHE study is quite detailed, with plenty of very doable recommendations. PEC is a relatively new organisation and with time and openness to positive feedback, and frequent exercises that give feedback, we hope it will be able to improve on its performance. But the presentation of the SAHE report did raise some interesting questions for me that were clearly beyond the scope of the SAHE study, but seem to be important for us to consider. Why have we set up PEC and what is the purpose of examining all school-going grade 5 and grade 8 children across the province? These questions are important to answer not only for Punjab, but in general also as we hear other provinces are also thinking about examination systems for their respective jurisdictions. Examinations are for checking out what children know and understand. They are used to see if we have been able to teach our children what we wanted them to learn at a particular stage in their lives and/or how well we have been able to do it. At grade 5, do we have another purpose for examinations?
Failing or passing children is not the issue, nor is ranking them an issue as there is nothing to be gained from that. We have to educate all of our children up to a certain minimum and examinations tell us if we have succeeded or failed, and how to improve things. Clearly we need to have this information. But do we need to examine all grade 5, 10-11 year olds, to do this? Can we not have a representative sample? And do we have to examine all six subjects, and for 2-3 hours each? Right now we make all 10-11 year old school-going children sit for 2-3 hour examinations, morning and evening, for a week or so, for the grade 5 examinations. Why is this needed? Why can we not have a representative sample of children, a representative sample of subjects, and shorter examinations? If a doctoral viva can be done in 90 minutes or so, why do grade 5 examinations have to be 2-3 hours each?
The grade 8 examination is also a bit perplexing. Why do we examine children in grade 8, through a public examination and in all eight subjects, when they are going to be tested in grade 9/10 anyway? What additional knowledge does the grade 8 examination give us? We do not sort children in grade 8 — that is done later — and secondary and higher secondary examinations are just round the corner. So why this examination?
Examinations, on the scale we are talking of, are not an easy or inexpensive task. It requires a huge amount of organisational effort as well. If these do not serve real purposes, then collecting data for just the sake of data collection is not a good idea. We need to have a deeper debate on this.
Grade 5 and grade 8 examinations are not for ‘certificates’ either. Now that Article 25A, the right to education, has been added to the constitution of the country, we need to educate all children between the ages of 5 and 16, or for 10 odd years up to Matriculation. So, what use are public examinations, for all school children, at grade 5 and/or 8? If we want information on quality of education, we can have a sample, and if we are looking to allow those children or adults who dropped out of school, for one reason or another, to be able to come back and/or have a certificate of literacy, we can arrange for optional grade 5 and grade 8 examinations that people can take. But the case for having such examinations for all school children, at both grade 5 and 8, in all subjects, with 2-3 hour examinations for each subject, can still not be made. Even if the aim is information gathering, we have a number of other bodies taking tests of children, and a number of education department offices like the Directorate of Staff Development, the Project Implementation Unit and so on, that collect information on teachers. The province-wide examinations seem like a relative waste of time, resources and effort. If the intention of those who made PEC was that examinations would somehow improve the quality of education, the connection is not at all clear. Just knowing how children are doing in grade 5 does not really alter the incentives of the teachers. It does give us information, about which areas were weak, where students struggled, and whether their understanding was adequate or not. And this information can be invaluable in design of teacher training, but the same information can be gathered through sample-based, shorter tests.
Subjecting 11 and/or 14 year olds to the rigours of public examinations, forcing the entire education system to gear for such examinations and conduct them at certain standards, is not a cheap exercise. We should have good reasons for it. It does seem that we have not thought this through in Punjab and there seems to be a need for such a debate before we decide to do more with PEC and/or choose our paths in other provinces. Just because something is being done or sounds good does not mean we should keep doing it.
The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]