The Central Board of Secondary Education has made a an announcement making Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations mandatory for classes 6 to 9 students to attend, in order to get their grades.
As per the report, this announcement is part of the new uniform assessment pattern which requires schools to assess students on their sincerity, attitude towards society, nation and other factors, which are hard to quantify, said teachers. According to the new system, discipline has been separated from scholastic activities and will be graded separately.
The grades will be given on a three-point grading scale with A being equal to outstanding, B as very good and C qualifying as fair. However, this move has left principals and teachers puzzled.
"How can you judge anybody on sincerity?" asked Deepshikha Srivastava, the principal of Rajhans Vidyalaya in Andheri. "The best we can do is to ask the teachers to make a note in the calendar if the child behaves in an extremely anti-social manner," she added.
Each school is supposed to devise its own mechanism to measure such intangible attributes of the students, but this would come in the way of standardisation, said principals.
"Every school will do it differently. Some might mark students for attending national days, while others on their interactions with other kids," said Avnita Bir, principal of RN Podar School in Santacruz. While schools have welcomed the new system, they admitted that it will once again bring back 'rote-learning' and discourage 'activity-based learning'.
"Under the CCE scheme, children used to love coming to school as we conduct several activities to make learning fun," said Raj Aloni, principal, Ram Sheth Thakur Public School in Kharghar. He added, "The formative assessments were fun and the focus was on all-round development."
Source: indiatoday.intoday.in/education