CBSE, ICSE: Pick Your Poison

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What is CBSE? What is ICSE? Is one better than the other?

For parents, it is akin to being asked to choose which poison to administer to their child. Both these exam boards cram a huge amount of knowledge into our children while chipping away at their individuality so that by the time they finish school they are are no square pegs left to squeeze into round holes.

CBSE schools are affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education, based in Delhi, which is why some schools will say they are attached to the “Delhi Board,” as opposed to the regional “state board.”

The CBSE board conducts two examinations, one at the end of Class 10 (which it is now considering making optional), and another at the end of Class 12 (the results of which help determine which college a student might be able to enroll in).

Government and military employees face frequent transfers around the country. The CBSE board has a uniform curriculum tailor-made for this constituency.

The CBSE curriculum is largely rote-based, and therefore ideal for government and military schools as it is fairly easy to ensure the same textbooks and parroting teachers are available anywhere in the country. The exams test memory rather than intelligence.

The CBSE board is perceived as strong in mathematics and the sciences, and easy in English and social sciences. The same board also conducts entrance examinations for engineering and pre-medical courses, and the curriculum and questions of these coincide with its school syllabi.

This accounts for the widely held assumption that CBSE students perform better in these tests because they are already familiar with the subject matter tested.

Many private schools also offer the CBSE curriculum: It is an easy product to deliver even with barely adequate teachers. Customers don’t have to be sold on it as they are predisposed to think it gives their children an edge in the college market.

The other rival education brand, the ICSE, also has a cookie-cutter approach to education. But it has a far massive syllabus and essay type questions, which are a truer test of intelligence and expressiveness, and therefore harder to get perfect scores on.

A large portion of CBSE exam questions are multiple choice, making it easy for candidates to get perfect scores for correct answers even if they have poor language skills -- and therefore high overall scores. The board has recently modernized the curriculum, requiring more essays and reflective answers. It also plans to switch to a system of letter grades from 2010.

Parents opting for the CBSE system say they do so their children can get higher scores, giving them an edge in college applications (Most Indian colleges specify the minimum cutoff percentage of marks they want in applicants. If you got less, don’t even bother to apply.) However, many of the premier colleges in India administer entrance exams of their own precisely because they do not want just rote learners to crash their rolls and they want to pick their own candidates. So, scoring high in school board exams are no longer a shoo-in for admission to India’s top colleges.

The CBSE system is the default choice for many who want their children to study engineering or medicine because popular myth has it that this board’s candidates are more likely to succeed in entrance exams. This is only a perception. The reality is that the majority of candidates who succeed in entrance exams for institutes such as IIT prepare themselves with additional private tutorials and coaching classes that teach test taking techniques that enable them to score high. In fact, actual surveys of students who made it to the Indian Institute of Technology, the holy grail of engineering studies in India, have revealed that a greater number of them hailed from ICSE rather than CBSE schools.

The national education minister Kapil Sibal recently shook the massive ants’ nest that the country’s education system is by suggesting that his government is likely to abolish the 10th grade examination, starting with the CBSE’s own exam, from 2011.

Under the new system, students will be assessed by their own schools, and over a longer period so that a single exam does not have the power make or break their lives. Letter grades will be awarded rather than marks so students have benchmarks for their performances, without having their worth measured in percentages and decimals derived from one exam. These are all sensible changes.

These are all necessary and welcome changes. Indian students generally perform well on tests that require cramming and offering predictable answers. They are unable to think out of the box because our education system does not nurture or reward this skill.

The 10th grade exam is often a dress rehearsal for the 12th grade exam, which supposedly prepares you for college exams, and ad nauseam. If an exam exists solely to prepare children for another bigger exam, then it has no intrinsic value of its own. Our 9th and 10th graders devote two years to cram for a week of sit-down exams. Imagine, if that time was spent in experiencing the joy of learning for the sake of learning before they are spat out of the system and into the cynical world where skills are worthwhile only if they are marketable or capable of generating money.