Students in Tripura, Maharashtra, Goa, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal face relatively tougher exams in their Class 10 and 12 state board examinations, an analysis of English and Mathematics question papers from 17 school education boards by PARAKH, a standard-setting body under the NCERT, has found. PARAKH carried out the analysis, a first of its kind by the Union Government, over the past year in a bid to develop a formula for standardising assessment by school boards across the country. The results were recently made public in PARAKH's latest report titled ‘Establishing Equivalence Across Boards.’ According to the report, Tripura Board of Secondary Education had the highest proportion (66.6%) of ‘hard’ questions, followed by Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (53.57%), Goa Board (44.66%), Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education (44.44%) and West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (33.33%). Amongst these five Boards, students in Chhattisgarh were relatively better off as their papers had a similar proportion (47.62%) of ‘easy’ questions. Goa had, apart from ‘hard’ questions, only ‘medium’ level questions (55.34%) and no ‘easy’ ones. Maharashtra had an equal proportion of ‘easy’, ‘hard’ and ‘medium’ questions, the PARAKH report said. According to PARAKH, ‘easy’ questions are those that a ‘large majority of learners exposed to relevant learning opportunities would be expected to answer correctly.’ ‘Hard’ questions are those which only a minority of learners would be able to answer. The difficulty level of questions for this exercise was judged by experts, said the report, adding that these are “inherently subjective” and should be “interpreted with caution”. Overall, across the 17 school education boards — including those of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Manipur, Odisha, Nagaland, Himachal and Kerala, apart from CISCE, which conducts ICSE and ISC exams — PARAKH found that questions mostly ranged “from easy to medium difficult level”, the report said. “There could be many reasons for this, but this does not help the learners to attain higher standard. Hence, the boards should be advised to prepare question papers that would help learners to be creative and imaginative,” the report said. Apart from the Chhattisgarh board, those with the highest percentage of ‘easy’ questions were Odisha’s Board of Secondary Education (40%) and the CISCE (38.39%). The analysis also looked at the “cognitive demand” of questions papers across the 17 school boards and found that the question papers of Board of Secondary Education Haryana (HBSE or BSEH) carried most items (64.71%) that test rote memory, followed by Goa (57.89%), Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education (53.13%) and Odisha (50.77%). On the other hand, Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (87.76%) had most questions that test a student’s understanding, followed by Nagaland Board of Secondary Education (73%), Tripura Board of Secondary Education (61.7%) and Kerala Board of Public Examination (61.54%).
