Necessary Reforms in Secondary School Certificate Exams - Essay Example

An average of 78 (80+76+79/3=78) percent of the students from all schools strongly agree that exams create high anxiety and stress in students’ minds, while 16 percent agree that, and only 5 percent disagree in the matter about exam causes anxiety in them. But no student strongly disagrees in this regard.  Inquiring into the reasons why exams cause such a high level of stress and anxiety among students, which leads them to end their lives; I found the following reasons mentioned in national policy documents (NCF, 2005, p.113-115; NFG, 2006, p.13-16): (4) Inflexibility of exams; [the same exam (question paper) for all] [As different learners learn in different ways (NCF,2005) it is not reasonable to expect the same level of competence from the learners with different scholastic abilities and learning speed who learn under widely variable teaching environment.] “Unlike in the US, it’s not a faulty gun law that’s killing Indian kids. Here, we have another way to kill our children. It’s called exams. At least six students ended their lives across the country, in metros, and in villages, on March 13 alone.

And all the suicides were attributed to examinations.” In the year 2006 five thousand eight hundred fifty-seven students, or more strikingly, sixteen students a day committed exam-induced suicide across India. These are the official figures declared by the National Crime Records Bureau of India (Times of India, 17th March 2008). Instead of testing ‘desired competencies and broader curricular objectives within cognitive domain’ (NFG, 2006), if exams claim young lives in such a ruthless way; it becomes imperative to reform them The students made the following suggestions of reforms that need to be implemented in order to reduce the stress of the exams.

They suggested reforms related to structural changes in the question paper and related to the timing and scheduling of the exam. In open responses to exam reforms a student suggests that to avoid stress because of unnecessary waste of time doing rough calculations, calculators should be allowed in subjects like maths and science.