ISLAMABAD: According to a report launched on Tuesday, improvements are needed in the examination system adopted by 28 Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE).

Titled, ‘Education Monitor Assessment System in Pakistan: Consideration of quality, effectiveness and use’, was launched by the Society for the Advancement of Education (SAHE).

The report covered primary, secondary and higher secondary levels of the examination system in detail.

The report said that almost all of the BISE, which deals with secondary and higher secondary examination, lack technical and professional staff with skills to effectively design and score examinations and analyse the data generated.

“All paper development and scoring activities are outsourced and research staff is virtually nonexistent. Paper setters, head examiners, and examiners are public school teachers with considerable experience either from secondary schools or colleges with appropriate subject specialization,” the report said.

The report said that paper setters are typically selected from an existing pool, and the recruitment criteria across the BISE is similar – with some exceptions, such as the Karachi Board of Secondary Education (BSE) – where examiners must have five years teaching experience at the secondary level, along with the Bachelor of Education or a masters-level degree.

The BISE were established at a time when national education policies reflected a need to reform secondary education, and were envisioned to manage all the aspects of this stage – of which examinations were just one aspect.

The report noted the role of examinations in transforming teaching, and emphasised external and internal, school-based, exams. “The government chose to establish the BISE as statutory bodies, formed on the basis of an act authorized by the provincial legislatures,” it said, and added that the BISE became solely associated with the function of organizing external examinations.

The report said the policies recognised the need to improve examination systems and institutions early on, and a task force appointed by the education ministry in 1985 noted the need for alignment between test content, curriculum objectives and teaching and learning processes.

It said the education policies of the 1990s sought to improve the capacity of examination staff, mechanise the process of preparing and declaring results, redo the format of examination papers to include objective type, short answer and essay type questions, and discourage rote learning.

The National Education Policy 2009 and the consequent education sector plans echoed many of these points in relation to assessments, and the police specifically discussed reducing differences in quality between examinations conducted by the BISE, reducing the number of such boards.

“Despite these policies there has been very little political will for reforming the BISE. At most, the emphasis has been on attempting to curtail cheating, while improving practices related to design and use of examination data remains outside the realm of efforts made,” the report said.

The report also said development partners have provided virtually no support to the BISE. “The lack of such support is in large part due to the lack of attention paid to secondary education by development partners who have traditionally focused on the primary and elementary stages of education,” it said.

The report argues that while the proliferation of all 28 boards has been justified by the increasing student population and the number of schools, given their mandate, this does not appear to be warranted. It says that, as the case of India indicates one board per state or province should be sufficient.

The report criticised the performance of the Inter-Board Committee of Chairmen, which consists of all the BISE chairmen. The IBCC is responsible for setting standards and ensuring uniformity in academic and evaluation standards amongst the BISE, among other duties. However, the report said that in practice, the committee does not play a significant role in setting standards or reviewing practices.

The report said intra-provincial committees such as the Punjab Board of Committee Chairmen make province specific decisions, such as those related to the choice of paper setters or the selection of examiners.

Following the 18th Amendment, these provincial bodies are supposed to expand their role, but they have not done so yet.

The report said the mandate of the BISE is beyond examinations, yet in practice their efforts are concentrated on organising examinations at the secondary and intermediate levels. It said analysts and programmers can be found on the staff of some boards, but they do not work on data analysis.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2016