The decision to recommend by concerned ministries to the government to scrap primary level PEC and junior secondary level JSC exams as reported in the press is welcome news (Daily Star, August 12, 2020). A quick decision will spare about six million candidates for these exams and their parents the additional anxiety about the public exams on top of the pandemic-induced mental agony they are suffering. A decision about an abridged HSC will do the same for a million students. The benefits will far outweigh any presumed loss in learning outcome. 

It is unlikely that schools can safely reopen in September. When they re-open, it will not be prudent to go back immediately to a normal daily routine. It is likely to be partial and conditional with safety restrictions continuing for some time. Students, teachers and parents who are in anxiety and fear now will be in similar anguish when schools restart. This would be hardly a conducive situation for

students to sit for a high stake public examination.

The Bangladesh Examination Development Unit (BEDU) of the Ministry of Education has indicated six options for the authorities about public exams at the secondary level. These range from cancelling examinations in case of school shutdown beyond October and exams on a reduced content and shorter duration tests. It has only laid out options without recommending a preferred solution.

Education experts have for a long time, ever since the PEC exam was introduced in 2010 and JSC exam in 2011, been sceptical about their value as tools of measuring learning achievement of students.

Studies have shown the pernicious backwash effects of shifting the focus to test-taking from learning, encouraging memorisation, increasing dependence on private coaching and commercial guidebooks, and creating incentives for corruption such as question leaks and marks tampering.

Public exams at grade 5 and 8, introduced in the name of improving quality of education, have ended up producing the opposite results. International experience and research show that quality improvement is achieved by providing quality-enhancing inputs, such as, skilled and motivated teachers, sufficient learning time in the class, manageable class size, attention to lagging students in the class and so on. Frequent public examinations is not the answer, especially when it detracts time and resources from the essential quality inputs.

If the pandemic compels scrapping the two exams this year, let this be an opportunity to re-examine the student assessment afresh. Most countries have scrapped public exams at primary and lower secondary level to assess and grade individual students and have shifted to assessment of the school system—how the schools and teachers are performing by measuring key competencies of students, such as reading and math, at key stages of primary and secondary education.

The National Student Assessment undertaken in Bangladesh every two years at grade 3 and 5 levels is such a method. This can be used more systematically to assess the system's performance and take policy measures to remedy weaknesses. The new Indian Education Policy announced last month has gone for such a system performance assessment at key stages.

A matter of worry and anxiety for about a million students and their parents and teachers is the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC), which did not start on April 1 as planned due to the pandemic. It is an elaborate affair that goes on for about six weeks and certainly of a much higher stake than PEC or JSC exams. The authorities face a conundrum because they cannot predict when the condition would be right for holding the exam in the usual manner.

Moreover, there is legitimate concern about how prepared the students would be psychologically and emotionally to sit for the usual and prolonged exam routine. Learning evaluation experts generally agree that a shorter well-constructed test   focusing on essential competencies related to the core subjects at the higher secondary level would be a better means of assessing student abilities and would have a higher predictive value regarding how students will do in tertiary education.

While this question may be debated further, at least for this year, it could be announced now that once the pandemic situation improves, a short and quick HSC will be held. This would be on core subject areas—a hundred marks test on each of the languages, math, science, social studies and one or two other combined papers depending on the academic stream, six or seven papers altogether. The exam could be completed within a maximum period of 10 days. A decision now will be a source of needed relief for the students and all others concerned. They will also have a chance to be intellectually and emotionally prepared for this arrangement.

The basic premise that guides the thinking of the education boards and even BEDU, the experts on examination, is that learning is divided into a lockstep of syllabus and specified time periods, for "covering" lessons and exams within school and public ones being the gateways. That students learn at their own pace, that most students are not at the level expected by the lockstep arrangement and that learning is cumulative and a continuum that require re-integrating what was learned earlier, and that lessons should "uncover" knowledge and meaning does not enter in the lockstep calculus.

The authorities are concerned about how much of the syllabus has been taught by the time the annual exams should be conducted. Does it matter, if some topics of math are not taught in grade 7, and are picked up in grade 8? A good number in any school in grade 8 would normally, without the pandemic closure, be lagging behind in any case and good pedagogy demands that they be helped to catch up.  The exigencies of the pandemic have provided another chance to consider these questions, if we are ready to step out  of the box.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed is professor emeritus at Brac University.