How Tamil Nadu aced board exam scores for years by manipulating results

In ‘Despite the State’, M. Rajshekhar writes on democratic failures in India, as part of a thirty-three month reporting project across six states.

An exam centre (representational image) | Facebook

Between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of students passing Tamil Nadu’s tenth standard state board exams rose from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. The number of students scoring a perfect hundred rose as well. In the twelfth standard too, overall pass percentage rose from 85 to 91, and average marks scored by students went up, along with centums.

These numbers, however, clashed with India’s National Achievement Survey (NAS), conducted by the centre’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which track learning outcomes across the country. The 2015 NAS assessment of tenth standard students placed Tamil Nadu close to the bottom in every subject. The report card for the state said, ‘Average performance of students in the state was significantly lower than the national average in all five subjects—English, Mathematics, Science, Social Science and (Modern Indian Language)—Tamil.’

When I met her, the then education secretary Sabitha Dayashankar dismissed the NAS data. ‘NCERT questions are based on the CBSE [Central Board of Secondary Education] pattern. Our children will not be able to understand.’ Later, she added, ‘We don’t know why NCERT is conducting these assessments. The Government of India should stop these and just fund us properly.’

These were extraordinary answers. Can science or mathematics be taught so uniquely that students cannot comprehend a question asked by a rival school board? How useful is such an education? Centralised evaluations are an accepted part of pedagogy. Not only do they test whether students understand concepts and utilise them but also provide an independent assessment of outcomes. Without them, all we have is states appraising their own work.

What I found here was a structural flaw and a government that, instead of correcting it, was boosting its own results by manipulating exam results.

By 2005, Tamil Nadu had three different schooling systems— government schools, matriculation schools and CBSE schools. Each differed in important ways. Government schools followed the state syllabus and taught in Tamil. CBSE schools followed their countrywide curriculum and taught in English. Matriculation schools, the fastest-growing segment of the state’s school sector, set their own syllabus, also in English, and held their own examinations. They had another unusual edge: ‘What is taught in sixth standard in a school elsewhere is taught in a matriculation school’s fourth standard,’ a former official at the Directorate of Government Examinations told me. The resulting sales pitch, that matriculation schools were better than the state board schools, resonated with parents.

This was an unfair system. Children in government schools, most of whom hailed from poor or more vulnerable communities, like dalits or scheduled tribes, got lower-quality education than the ones in matriculation schools. Students in the latter, however, received an education weaker than that of their peers in CBSE schools.

Around 2008–2009, under the DMK, this system finally saw an overhaul. Working under the DMK’s education minister Thangam Thennarasu, a group of government officials and educationists created a common syllabus for government and matriculation schools. Rote learning went out and activity-based learning came in. At the same time, with the passage of the Right to Education Act, 2009, the state scrapped exams till the ninth standard, while the state board retained the responsibility of conducting exams in the tenth and twelfth standards. The test-based evaluation system was revamped as well.

Matriculation schools opposed this move. The common syllabus meant they could no longer set their own curricula, an important differentiator between them and the state schools. Opposition also came from teachers. Some felt their schools were being dragged down to the level of government schools. Both matriculation schools and the teachers’ lobby were powerful forces. ‘Several of Tamil Nadu’s top politicians and bureaucrats own matriculation schools,’ Thennarasu said. Many of the teachers belonged to local caste associations.

The onus for making sure the new system worked passed to the AIADMK government, which was voted into power in 2011. ‘There should be a constant review to ensure adherence to the new system,’ said Thennarasu. ‘I have my doubts if this is happening.’ Such programmes were seen as something brought in by the previous government, he added.

Compounding matters, pressure to show dramatic improvements in education delivery rose under the AIADMK government. Till 1995, state pass percentages hovered around 60 or 70, said a consultant working with the state education department. And then, they started increasing. ‘The difference is that, during the DMK [government’s regime], these numbers would rise gradually—from 75.2 to 75.5, say—just to show there is no decline.’ But, in the past five years, the consultant said, ‘pass percentages have increased like anything. Out of every 100 students, 95 are passing.’

Bureaucrats were trying to make Chief Minister Jayalalithaa look good. College managements too had to be pleased. The former official at the Directorate of Government Examinations said, ‘If I declare 75 per cent as the pass percentage, I take 2 lakh students out of the college education market. That is the other lobby working here.’

By 2016, Tamil Nadu was handing out a ‘slow learners’ kit’ a few months before the state board examinations. A hundred and fifty pages long, it contained key questions from all five subjects. ‘Most of the questions [in the exam] are repeated from this,’ said Thennarasu.

‘The pattern doesn’t change. If students still don’t manage to pass, at 40 marks, the [AIADMK] government does moderation.’ The term ‘moderation’ was academic bureaucracy’s newspeak for manipulating exam results to make students pass. The former bureaucrat in the Directorate of Government Examinations corroborated Thennarasu’s claim. ‘We have a programme,’ he told me. ‘We tell it the targeted pass percentage, and it allots marks accordingly.’

This extraordinary claim was supported by numbers. Out of the total of 1,023,566 students who sat for the tenth standard board exams in 2016, the percentage of students who passed in four subjects— English, mathematics, science and social sciences—was exactly the same: 92.6. In 2015 too, the percentage of students who passed across the four subjects remained the same: 91.9. Such congruence is highly improbable.

Before 2011, Tamil Nadu’s education system was uneven. Students in rural, matriculation and CBSE schools got starkly dissimilar education. What the state had by 2016 was worse—a greased slide that passed students along to the next class without testing what they knew. Under the Right to Education Act, students cannot be failed till the eighth standard. But in Tamil Nadu, fearing a bad reputation, schools gave them the passing score in ninth standard too. Given the state’s efforts, it was hard for students to fail in the tenth exams. The eleventh standard was but a formality, an IAS officer in the state told me. ‘If a child is faring poorly, he or she is merely urged to transfer to another school.’ In twelfth too, the state tried to pass as many as possible. College admissions were based not on entrance exams but on the marks students scored in their twelfth board exams. The students were effectively tested for the first time only in the first year of college.

‘As kids pass without exams, the burden of incomprehension keeps rising,’ the consultant said. This showed clearly in the NAS surveys. The third round of the survey, conducted between November 2010 and March 2011, placed fifth standard students in Tamil Nadu close to the top. After a few more years of schooling, those students, when in class ten, completely squandered that lead and were stuck at the bottom along with states like Gujarat and Punjab. When an engineering college in Coimbatore administered a test to a new batch of students, 40 per cent of them failed. ‘They had all scored between 90 per cent and 100 per cent in their boards,’ a senior college official said. 

In Mizoram, Odisha and Punjab, I had traced back the failure to deliver health and education to underfunding and administrative incapacity. What I saw in Tamil Nadu was different. Here, a functional administration had begun ignoring systemic improvements in favour of ploys that made the elected political party look good at the cost of the state’s people.

This extract from Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope has been published with special permission from Context.