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.