will educational reforms hamper learning

The latest among a slew of reforms suggested by the new,energetic HRD minister shri Kapil Sibal is making the Xth boards optional.Further a committee of NCERT recommended that the final examiner of a student at 10th level should be his school teacher so that the warm teacher student relationship is maintained,a far from practical argument in favour of doing away with the 10th board exams.Mr.Sibal further goes on and argues that an all india examination with central evaluation traumatises the candidate and hence a percentile system should be the parameter to assess his knowledge.I highly admire the minister's efforts to take some load off the shoulders of thousands of youngsters .But i would like to put forth a simple question.After more than 10 years of schooling and intellectual grooming under the watchful eyes of parents and teachers if the child isn't ready to face a national level competition then probably his school education should be questioned.A national level competition in 10th standard challenges,the mental faculties of a student and gears him up for the greater challenges ahead.Further,during 10+2 every student opts for some particular stream (arts,science,commerce...) where the number of subjects come down but each one becomes more intensive and complicated.Hence a proper marks based assessment in matriculation will help a student to discover his strengths and accordingly choose a particular discipline.I would like to stress that a percentile system as suggested by the honorable minister doesn't solve the purpose.This is because,percentile gives you relative evaluation of your performance,which may be apt for an entrance examination where candidates are tested for speed and analytical ability.But board exams are different .They measure the knowledge of a student as well as his preparedness to carry out further studies in any particular subject.They are rightly called qualifying examination as they assess whether a candidate qualifies to learn further.Awarding grades is again insufficient as it projects a range of marks and not the exact score of the candidate.What can be done is making provisions for selection of subjects during the academic year.This has to be done keeping in mind the requirements of pre university.Many students face difficulty in the sciences while some find language papers difficult to tackle,so here they can clearly go with their choice.Hence i strongly oppose scraping of the board exams which are an essential means of merit based evaluation in our country.