Rote to reason
Year after year, the print and electronic media are saturated with reports of disturbing irregularities in board examinations. Despite the yearly promises of digitisation and reforming the grading system, everything falls apart when it comes to conducting examinations. The papers are invariably leaked in advance, the examination centres are sold to the highest bidder, mass cheating is organised, mobile phones are permitted, the invigilators pretend blindness, the marks sheets are interchanged, and the results are altered. Regrettably, Sindh, having already squandered an unjustified $75 million ADB loan, stands at the forefront of these unethical practices.
The dismal performance of Intermediate and Secondary Examination Boards has created a deep divide within Pakistan's education system. Every year, about 110,000 students, from private schools and affluent families appear in 'O' and 'A' level examinations conducted by Cambridge Assessment International Education, which is part of the University of Cambridge. The total annual expense for conducting Cambridge examinations (O Level and A Level), twice a year, is estimated to be between Rs25 billion and Rs35 billion (approximately $90 million to $125 million) – an amount that well compares with the annual budget of the Higher Education Commission (HEC). This criminal willingness of the state to cough out scarce foreign exchange to serve a privileged few, rather than reform its own dilapidated examination boards, is simply inexplicable.
The mainstream of five to six million students who sit for Matric and Intermediate examinations across Pakistan have no choice but to suffer the indignity and mismanagement of the 'memory testing' that Intermediate and Secondary Boards established in each province. Echoing the colonial era - when education was designed to create compliant clerks – our examination boards have done little to rise above that legacy.
The recipe to reform the mismanaged Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) in Pakistan is not an unknown science. Hire qualified teachers, examiners and administrative staff through transparent, merit-driven processes; move toward online registration, automated paper generation, digital marking and result processing; shift from rote memorisation to conceptual and analytical questions; and create autonomous regulatory bodies to oversee BISE operations. But all this would not happen unless the senior government officers, ministers and politicians were mandated to place their children in government schools and sit for local board examinations. If the French Education Minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castér could be asked to resign for transferring her son to a private school, so could the ministers in Pakistan.
Though much delayed, the recent initiative of Pakistan's Inter Boards Coordination Commission (IBCC) to seek help from the Aga Khan University Examination Board (AKU-EB) for implementation of the minimum exam standards is praiseworthy. Established in 2002, the AKU-EB is a world class examination system whose programmes are based on the national curriculum of Pakistan, aimed at being accessible to both English and Urdu medium schools. With the affiliation of over 400 schools, the AKU-ED represents an indigenous educational movement created for Pakistani students, with an emphasis on concept-based learning and a conscious rejection of rote memorisation that plagues many Pakistani schools today.
AKU-EB examination services are at least 40 times less expensive than what we pay for the 'O' and 'A' level exams, and its graduates are happily welcomed by some of the finest universities of the world. It's time to replace the 36 outdated, inefficient, porous and poorly managed Examination Boards that continue to churn out rote learners instead of students who would make a meaningful contribution in a modern society. Why is Pakistan reluctant to learn from a brilliant examination system, performing an outstanding task, in its own backyard?