Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Last weekend, I saw an alarming list. A teacher at a private school in Dehradun was grading math papers and I peeked into the marks list. The class was averaging about 20 out of 40.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I fully empathise. I would barely scrape through myself. But what worried me wasn’t the average grade. It was how individual students were faring. 

“The same students who scored 38 on 40 in an online prelim are getting 7 on 40 now,” the teacher told me. And he’s panicking, because these kids have to appear for their 12th class board exam in a week. “They learnt nothing online,” he says, shaking his head.

It’s been a cruel two years for our students. Between school closures, online assessments, and partial re-openings, students don’t feel ready to give an all-important, in-person board exam. That’s why, this week, Twitter’s been flooded with calls to cancel the second instalment of the two-part board exam, devised specifically for the Covid year. Most such appeals are Covid-related. Then, there’s this.

Board exams are an axis that India’s entire education system revolves around. The marks you get in your board usually determine what colleges you can even apply to. But that centrality has been shaken by a new exam in town—the Central University Entrance Exam, or CUET—which threatens to make the boards redundant.

It’s a good time, then, to ask a provocative question: Why have board exams at all?

A dangerous zero-sum game

The board exam is under existential threat. 

Students don’t want to appear for it. The CUET has finished the importance of board marks. And its battle with Covid has ended the board exam’s reliable periodicity. The axis is teetering—and so much that the Supreme Court, India’s apex judicial body, had to finally get involved.

But there are other voices in the system that strongly oppose cancellation. Ironically, one of them is the teacher who’s sure half his class is going to fail. “Without an external exam, schools can over-moderate the marks. Everyone is going to get a 90%,” he says. 

The fear is that students would pass with top grades, but the CUET, or any other centralised test, would stump them at the university level. We’ve written previously about the worrying matter of grade inflation in India. 

The most problematic issue is the centralised entrance test, says Meeta Sengupta, who has decades of experience working with the Indian education system. Making the CUET the only criteria for selection is, to put it mildly, premature.