WHEN Javed told me that he had ‘failed’ his Matriculation examination, I was saddened. I knew that Javed, despite the very trying financial circumstances of his household, had worked hard. He had not ‘failed’ as such. He had just not obtained the percentage needed to get into a decent public sector college. This was the same thing as failure to him as this meant he had to leave his studies and start working. His parents could not afford a college education for him. And his marks were not enough to get him a scholarship. So, there was not much of a choice.
This is not just the story of Javed. It is also the story of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people in Pakistan. Government schools are free, books used to be free too; the Punjab Education Foundation and similar bodies from other provinces subsidise school education for millions of children. But, post-Matriculation, the support becomes a lot less. We have fewer colleges as well. Millions do not continue beyond Matriculation.
One could argue this is how it should be. Children who get more marks in school-leaving examinations should be the ones to get the opportunity to continue to college level. This makes sense if marks are based on talent, intelligence and ability. In a country where inequality is high, the education system fragmented and where financial capacity determines the type of education a child gets, examination marks do not simply measure ability. Javed, on the basis of his intelligence and keenness, is comparable to any student coming from top private schools. But his parents could only send him to a government school where, even though he was the top student in his class, the quality of education imparted was so poor that he would never have been able to compete with students coming from higher quality private and public schools.
But who needs access to college education more? A child from a richer household or Javed? Both. But for Javed, education is, most likely, the only means of social and economic mobility. When in school, he dreamt of one day clearing his CSS examinations and becoming a DMG officer. Now he has to think about taking up a trade because his father, the sole breadwinner, needs support; and since college is not an option, he has to put his shoulder to the task as well.
Should school-leaving exams be the only way to judge who ought to continue their education?
Should school-leaving summative assessments be the only way to judge who ought to continue their education? Especially when the examinations test more memory and reproduction and not critical thinking or intelligence and when access to school education is so dependent on parental incomes?
The high-stakes nature of the school-leaving examination shows up in the tremendous stress and pressure that students and their parents undergo. Every year, we hear stories of children who die by suicide or go into depression after results are announced. The anxiety during examination season, currently ongoing, is also palpable. It can be felt by parents too. This is neither healthy nor desirable. It is definitely unnecessary as the high-stakes summative nature of school-leaving examinations is not an essential feature of all school systems. We can design assessments to be different. There are many countries that do not have summative high-stakes school-leaving exams. And there are plenty that have formative assessments that take into account performance over a longer period of time and across a range of abilities, so that memory and reproduction are not preferred over the ability to think, analyse and present.
We are currently seeing another stress point too. High-stakes summative examinations provide a strong incentive to ensure results — which is often at the cost of fairness. Getting access to examination papers before exam time becomes an ‘advantage’ that many parents and students are willing to pay a substantial amount for. Cheating in domestic board examinations comes up as a problem almost every time Matriculation and Intermediate examinations are held. For the last few years, the Cambridge ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level examinations have been facing similar issues as well. In fact, it happened this year too.
But this is extremely disturbing for students. Students prepare hard for examinations. If examinations are cancelled, postponed or not graded due to paper leaks, the future of students, given the high-stakes nature of these examinations, is put at risk. Anxiety levels for students and parents then go through the roof.
This would not be as much of a problem if final examinations, even if they were there, were a much smaller component of overall assessment and/ or if they were a small part of all the instruments that were being looked at and evaluated.
A few days ago, I was doing class observations in Grade 8-9 in a school. This was a low-fee private school with a decent reputation for quality. The overwhelming method of teaching and learning was: the teacher and students had guide books. After reading the chapter, the teacher would read out the end-of-chapter questions and their answers in class, taking care to explain any difficult or unfamiliar words, and then she would just ask the students to ‘learn’ all the answers. This was rote learning par excellence and considered to be the way to prepare for final assessments. If high-stakes assessments are testing this, clearly we need to rethink the approach!
Assessments are used for ranking, though it is a poor way of ranking students on simple measures, and they are, in Pakistan at least, used for forcing children to study: fear of exams makes students learn. But this is wrong. Assessments should be seen as a means of encouraging learning: they tell us where we need to focus our teaching and learning efforts. Clearly, our high-stakes summative assessments have drifted too far from this objective. We need to rethink the role of assessments in our system at a very fundamental level.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2026