Covid-19 has caused immense disruption to the education sector. It has literally forced the universities to reimagine every aspect of higher education right from curricular provisions, instructional materials, pedagogical processes, mode of delivery to mode of assessment and award of degrees. In certain manner it has exposed the fragility of the system to the extent that some of the universities are indecisive about the conduct of examination and declaring the results of the final year students.
The revised guidelines of the UGC, which have asked the universities to conduct the final-year examination within 30 September 2020, have further complicated the issue. It has resulted in an avoidable standoff between the regulators and good-sized stakeholders. The issue would have been conveniently resolved had individual universities been allowed to exercise their autonomy keeping in view their social and physical realities, coupled with knowledge of technical and professional aspects of assessment of learning in which area the university system has ample scholarship. Sadly, this stalemate has now reached the doorsteps of the Supreme Court because the system does not have the capacity to adapt to such changes.
Those who are opposing the UGC guidelines are genuinely scared of the consequences of the unstoppable Covid-19 pandemic which has created mayhem all over the world. Furthermore, they seem to be convinced with the alternate mode of assessment which suggests that the final-year students may be awarded degrees or diplomas on the basis of the average performance of their previous semesters coupled with the sessional evaluation of the last semester provided it turns out to be above the minimum criteria of passing laid down by the universities in their statutes or ordinances. The rationality of this argument needs to be analysed in a more dispassionate manner for the benefit of all the stakeholders.
Universities are expected to assess the performance of the individual students on the basis of three criteria, namely the performance of the students with regard to self, with regard to peer group, and with regard to intended learning outcomes. When a student is continuously and comprehensively assessed over a period spanning five semesters, it is presumed that her performance in the sixth semester is not going to be drastically different from the earlier five semesters and therefore averaging her performance for the purposes of awarding the degree, under the present life threatening situations, will be as fair an assessment as that of the summation of all the semesters. A lot of merit can be seen in this argument if the process of awarding marks or grades in the current evaluation system is further clarified.
It is a known fact that most universities are essentially using the 101 point interval scale for the evaluation of students in terms of marks and grades. This scale is based on two tentative assumptions. First, it assumes that the entire scale is divided into hundred units of equal sizes, which means that the difference between 40 and 41 is as much as the difference between 99 and 100. Second, it assumes that the zero on the scale represents the nothingness of an attribute and that 100 represents absolute 100. Both these assumptions are incorrect because the difference between any two subsequent units on the scale does not remain the same because it gets wider and wider as one moves on the scale from left to right. Similarly, zero on the scale does not represent the nothingness of an attribute, nor 100 represents absolute 100. If someone is awarded zero mark, it may not be appropriate to infer that she knows nothing and similarly it may be equally inappropriate to presume that one who gets 100 marks has mastered every competency to the level of hundred percent. These are the limitations of this scale which do not allow us to add the marks of one subject with another subject, nor permit us to compare the marks or grades across the subjects nor across the years.
Furthermore, the marks awarded in any examination, called the raw scores, never reflect the true scores of the learners as they get contaminated because of plethora of subjectivity which creeps into assessment procedures due to inter-examiner variability, imperfection of sampling of test contents, difficulty levels of questions, arbitrary time limits, etc. And, there is hardly any university which might be using statistical methods for transforming the raw scores into standard scores and using the latter for declaring the results. Further to this, it is also empirically proved that the magnitude of errors in measurement, which are called Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) might vary from 10-15% in a hundred marks paper. In such a situation, if a student is awarded 60 marks and the SEM is taken as 10, her marks are likely to be anywhere between 50 and 70 in two out of three cases and between 40 and 80 in nineteen out of twenty cases and between 30 and 90 in all the cases. It is precisely because of this reason that grading is considered a better system of evaluation than the numerical marking system wherein students are placed in certain predetermined ability bands which can be represented by letter grades. If there are such wide variations, then the assessment of students in one of the semesters should not be accorded such a monumental priority and that too during such unusual times.
While the universities have been asked to conduct the examination in offline, online or blended mode, the fact remains that most of them do not have the capacity to go in for a proctored examination. One of the premier universities in Delhi tried to do it but could not succeed even whilst conducting the mock examination due to technical glitches at the levels of both students and university. It is easier to say that students can write their examinations from the place of their residence. But the fact remains that Internet connectivity, speed, scale and availability of smart devices are serious issues which will continue to frustrate such moves for some time to come. It is not possible for most universities to invent the framework required for the conduct of proctored examination within a couple of weeks.
When the country is constantly witnessing a monumental surge of fatalities and infections and when there is no hope of any respite soon from Covid-19 pandemic in the near future, it may be appropriate to go in for a single policy at this point in time so that there is some sort of standardisation across the universities. It is advisable that the universities may be allowed to go in for the aforementioned measures.
Our university system has thus far remained too obsessed with offline mode of assessing students’ learning, now the time seems to have come to incorporate into our curriculum the contours of online and blended modes of examination with all their technological perspectives. Universities, on their part, must focus on how the examination needs to be morphed over time to allow these kinds of things to happen in a natural manner. It is necessary to invest energy more on things like how to scale teachers and put a qualified, competent and caring teacher in each class, how to design curricula and syllabi with futuristic orientation so that it prepares youth for tomorrow’s world, how to decentralise the decision-making process, and how to bring in technology into education at a scale.
The writer is former Chairperson, University Grants Commission.
