Education for all: Ashok Ganguly

What has been the real success of 2003 Board results?
The real achievement has been the increase in the pass percentage of government schools, Jawahar Navodya Vidyalayas and Kendriya Vidyalayas. Their performance has bridged some gap between them and the private schools. A large number of students have received merit certificates in various subjects too.
What type of flexibility does CBSE offer in the choice of subjects?
The CBSE offers a wide variety of subjects, flexibility and autonomy to the schools. Universities consider subjects like bio-technology and multimedia as vocational. Their course structure has been reframed to make them more acceptable. We do not offer any fixed combination of subjects or classify them into streams. To avoid difficulties in higher education, certain combinations are facilitated by the schools.
How can the gap between school and university education be bridged?
Strong co-ordination and co-operation needs to be established to facilitate effective linkages between school and university education. There shouldn’t be any overlap in the curriculum of the two and new subjects should be introduced at the UG level. Moreover, certain components of class X performance should be considered.
What is your opinion about grading vis-a-vis marking?
The reason for stress among students is to score high percentage of marks. Marks alone cannot determine the success of a student. Grades will reduce stress, can be converted to any level of decimal point one wants and encourage continuous assessment and evaluation in the system.
What are your comments on the evaluation system. What is the reason for the low percentage of marks in English this year?
Ours is a foolproof, meticulous and scientific system of evaluation. The objective and marking behind each question is clearly defined. The answer sheet goes through various stages of correction.
Students take subjects like English lightly. This is reflected in the answer sheets as value points were missing. Answer sheets have been evaluated by the public school teachers. Presently, we are looking into the matter.
Any future plans on the anvil?
The CBSE aims at holistic education. From this academic year, we are introducing life skill education from class VI to X. Disaster Management Education from class VIII to X and functional English in class XI. In addition, we have suggested to do away with homework and school bags upto class II, no categorisation of pass and fail upto class V and grading system atleast upto class VIII.