RAYEES AHMAD KUMAR
Schools in the Kashmir valley reopened after a hiatus of more than two months of winter vacations. With the introduction of March session last year to make it uniform all over the country, students of all classes had already geared up to face the yearly annual exams. District Institute of Education and Trainings(DIETs) of all the districts of valley had finalized the datesheet of primary and upper primary classes well before the school Reopening. State Council for Education Research and Training (SCERT) Srinagar, also made the datesheet of class 8th public couple of weeks ago. Accordingly the examination of class 8th of Kashmir division commenced on 13th of March. Students faced the first paper of Urdu amid a pleasing smile on their faces, as the paper Setter had taken into account not only the cognitive abilities of students but also their aspirations into his mind. The question paper was prepared so nicely that it recieved applause from both teachers and students. Parents too expressed their satisfaction over the standard and level of the question paper. It was divided into four parts comprising of eleven questions in all. The first part to assess the reading comprehension of students, comprised of a brief paragraph on Himalayas mountain range, followed by a set of five questions which the students had to answer. The paragraph was so comprehensive and easy to understand that students wrote the answers with ease. It was loaded with crucial information and students learned a lot about Himalayas alongside sitting in the exam. They got the knowledge about different mountain peaks, main rivers originating from the Himalayas and the percentage of people dwelling in different countries beneath the mountain ranges while going through this question paper. Students felt like being in learning labs while turning the pages of question paper. Question no 2 was based on some poetic couplets, it's five parts were multiple choice questions, students without encountering any difficulty chose the right answer. It was a poem written about the beauty and resources of poet's homeland. Question no 3 was again asked to check the learning ability of the students in the form of a brief paragraph but this one chosen from the textbook. It was a nicely written paragraph about safron and safron fields of Pampore Kashmir. It also had five part questions which were comfortably answered by students. Part second of the question paper was from the grammar portion. Five different sentances were written on the paper and students had to choose a noun, adjective, verb, subject and predicate from these sentences just to check their linguistic skills. Two more questions from part second, were designed to check religious knowledge and plurals of some words. In part third of the paper, students were given two choices to write an essay about 100-150 words just to check their writing ability and skill. In it's other two questions, students were asked to write an application or letter and to use some phrasal words in their own sentances. The Last and fourth part of the question paper, dealt with some questions from prose and poetry lessons of the book which the students were asked to give answers with a wide range of choice. After many years I have gone through a question paper that was not just designed to check the learning comprehension and a vast amount of knowledge students had acquired during the academic session but they were this time relieved off the stress which they would usually accompany to their exam halls. Besides being easy to understand, the question paper provided them what they needed at the right moment. Alongside writing the answers to the questions in the exam hall, examinees acquired extra amount of information which they previously lacked while going through the pages of the paper. The question paper seemed an outcome of extensive consultations with stakeholders, experts and research work of months together. Persons from SCERT, associated with the formulation of such question papers need to be appreciated and they deserve special recognition for discovering the latest scale of measuring students abilities without drowning them in the well of exam-phobia. If the trend goes on, not only the enrollment in public schools will see a surge but the entire educational scenario will be transformed. Need of the hour is to embrace such paper setup both at SCERT and BOSE level, so that our coming generations would ingest a bulk of information while sitting in the examination hall and examophobia will no longer haunt them. It will definitely have positive repercussions and students will enjoy to sit in the examination rather to get in melancholy. It will pave the way for their easy cracking of recruitment exams through various recruiting agencies like JK SSRB, JK PSC and SSC etc
Writer is a columnist hailing from Qazigund Kashmir.
