Mita Mukherjee

The Bengal government has made it mandatory for every state-aided school in the state to submit their students’ scores in the ongoing annual examinations to the school education department as a part of a mechanism adopted by the government to monitor learning levels of students.

Schools will have to upload the final examination marks obtained by students in every subject on the education portal and the government will check the scores through an online process. The report cards will be prepared by the department and uploaded on the portal from where the individual schools will download them and distribute them to their students.

This is the first time results of internal examinations held by individual schools will be examined by the government in a centralized manner.  Report cards of students too had never before been prepared by the government in this way, a senior official of the school education department said.

The move has been initiated mainly with a view to identify the low performing schools and necessary measures needed to be taken to put the institutions in place to improve students’ performance, the official said.

The process—monitoring schools ‘ performance in the internal test—will be a continuous one and heads of schools have been directed to continue uploading students’ marks of all the examinations conducted by the schools internally throughout the year, including three formative and three summative tests.

In Bengal, government schools follow the January to December calendar and the annual examinations in all such schools are in progress.

Surveys held recently by different agencies had revealed that the two-year shut down of schools due to the pandemic has led to a huge learning gap among government school students, particularly at the primary level. The monitoring mechanism has been adopted with a view towards correcting the courses and finding out the remedies for filling up the learning gaps created due to the closure of the schools.

Since the schools will enter the students’ marks in individual subjects on the portal, the department will be able to check at a glance the overall subject-wise performance level of students and take remedial measures accordingly.

For example, if it is found that the overall scores in a particular subject, say mathematics, is low in most schools in all the internal tests, then a detailed study can be arranged to find out the exact reasons and appropriate measures can be taken, the education department official said.

Heads of several state-aided schools welcomed the move. Subhrojit Dutta, headmaster of Hindu School run by the school education department said, they have already received the instructions regarding submission of the final examination marks. “ We are ready to follow the government instructions,” Dutta said.

Also Read: Bengal: Govt adopts policy to improve reading habits of school students