Reforming assessments.

PUBLIC boards for intermediate and secondary education still have a poor reputation in terms of the quality of their assessments and what they measure. Despite decades of reform efforts, board examinations are still known to be too dependent on memory and rote learning, past papers and predictable patterns for the kind of questions that are asked. The practical side of assessments continues to be ignored. And there are serious concerns about grade inflation as well. As a result, performance in the board examinations has become a weak measure for the quality of education and even individual standing.

One outcome of this is that parents and students who can afford it have been opting for other boards. The Cambridge 'O'/'A' Level examinations are the main alternative but high school diplomas and International Baccalaureate are options as well. These international boards/certifications have a positive reputation but they come with a significant price tag. Most children/parents cannot afford the examination fees of international boards and they also cannot afford the fees charged by schools that prepare students for such examinations.

Though we have 30-odd intermediate and secondary examination boards in the country, 28 of these are public/government boards. These 28 boards, apart from the Islamabad Capital Territory Board, are geographically defined and have, more or less, monopolies in the regions they work in. Punjab has eight boards; the earliest one, the Lahore Board, was set up in 1954, while the last one to be established was the Sahiwal Board in 2012. Similarly, Sindh has six boards where the latest one, the Shaheed Benazirabad Board, was set up in 2015.

Why do we have so many boards in the public sector, why are they geographically defined and given monopolies and why are they not allowed to compete with each other? The government has been unable to reform these boards through bureaucratic initiatives, so should we not allow the market to work its magic through competition? The private boards have to compete for students; why should the same pressure not be applied to the public boards?

Despite all the talk, progress on reforming our examination systems and boards has been slow.

Twenty-eight boards setting examinations when Pakistan does not have many assessment experts and/or psychometricians is clearly asking for poor quality exams. If we had just one board or a few boards, we could gather experts there; with 28 boards this is not...