PUNE: A niggling worry about school-level exams is creeping into students, parents and educators.
After the pandemic robbed them of normal schooling, many pupils who already have unpleasant memories of taking online exams, are even more anxious now about the syllabi and the mode of examination.
Many groan at the struggle they face while taking the tests sitting at home. Connectivity, internet speed, the fear of not writing enough, slow and illegible writing, absence of subjective type questions and immense focus on multiple choice questions even for senior classes have eroded the seriousness of taking a test, they said.
Parents said that since schools won’t be fully functional till February 15, any teaching will only be half-done. The school year ends in March leaving a mere 45 days to finish teaching before the final exams that are usually conducted in April. Given the learning setbacks, full-fledged exams seem a farce, they added.
Assailed by a host of worries about learning losses in students across classes, teachers are more anxious about bridging them, completing the syllabus, and ensuring a minimum competency for the next class as they toggle between offline and online teaching.
They said the concentration level they require while teaching was much higher as the students attending online often fail to catch up with the offline class and many students end up quitting the session. Teachers felt that it would be easier to go with one mode solely instead of blended teaching.
Vishal Nair, whose daughter is studying in a CBSE school in Std VIII, said that the students started attending offline classes about a month ago, but have gone back to the online mode and the teachers are trying to complete the portion in the best possible way.
Another parent, Yasmin Saudagar from Kalyaninagar, said that some parents of students studying in her son's class had got together two months ago and written to the school to stop conducting the MCQ tests as they had no meaning.
A working parent said her daughter’s school expected parents to monitor tests and exams and to drop the answer sheets to the school for correction and feedback.
For teachers, conducting regular classes has also been a headache with the blended form. Amar Upadhyay, teaching in CBSE government school, said the dual mode of teaching was slowing the process of teaching and conducting exams.
“When we keep the camera on for the students attending online, 99% times some child or the other complains of network, unclear sound, unable to pick up the teaching due to the classroom ambience and other stuff. When the online students complain, the offline students get disturbed and start losing focus. In this situation, there is no way we would complete the syllabus in classroom teaching. We have to give some part of the syllabus to study on their own.”
Subject teachers more importantly faced issues with the blended form of teaching and they admitted that after a point, many online students who joined the session quit over lack of understanding.
Ashok Rakshe, a teacher at a civic school in Kharadi, said that he was teaching concepts in physics and there were many doubts raised by the students attending online. “As I took up their doubts, the offline students started getting restless. There was a session last week when the number of online students reduced to just two which started with 12 in the beginning of the session.”
