Examinations: The Central Governance Concern in Indian Universities

Abstract

Examinations, chiefly for historic reasons, have been a crushing preoccupation for students, schools, universities, and the Indian society at large, particularly for many monolithic faculty-universities awarding coveted professional degrees in healthcare and engineering. The stress on bureaucratic expediency and confidentiality, fear of public disapproval, dearth of manpower, media sensationalism, litigations and the genuine threat of corruption, together compel universities to allocate bulk of their resources (human as well as capital) towards adopting a brutally centralized governance model for achieving an ostensibly "transparent" evaluation system. Although the university administration spends most of its time in planning, scheduling, organizing and conducting examinations, nearly 70% of student-evaluation, ironically, occurs in a single sitting lasting three hours and the answer paper is typically valued in about 8 minutes. Consequently, such evaluation systems ignore the functions and purpose of examinations, its content and construct validity, reliability, objectivity, its timing and timeliness, thereby perpetuating a ritualized, self-defeating, stagnating curriculum. While decentralisation of evaluation through autonomy is most desirable, training teachers to prepare question papers amenable to objective evaluation, with question papers validated for content/ difficulty levels, might help in the near term.