ENTRANCE TEST/STATE AND NATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT SURVEY (NAS)/QUESTION BANK (unit 5)

                                                                                                                                                                                 

ENTRANCE TEST

An entrance examination is an examination that many educational institutions use to select students for admission. These exams may be administered at any level of education, from primary to higher education, although they are more common at higher levels.

 In India, entrance examinations are chiefly confined to Medicine, Engineering and Management. These range from the BITS Pilani admission test and IIT- JEE, where only one in a hundreds can hope to get admission to state level entrances which are many and varied.

 The stiff competition has led to a situation where many students neglect their school studies and focus solely on entrance coaching which is time-consuming and expensive. This has led many states to scrap the entrances and base admissions on the school leaving marks which unfortunately are none too reliable.

Experts point out that in a country where many different boards are present common entrances are essential, but application skills rather than cramming should be stressed on. Frequent changes in the pattern of examination are essential since sticking to a 'standard text ‘or 'standard pattern' alone will favour the coaching industry and the role- learners.

STATE AND NATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT SURVEY (NAS)

National Achievement Survey (NAS) is a nationally representative large-scale survey of students' learning undertaken by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. NAS gives a system level reflection on effectiveness of school education. Findings help compare the performance across spectrum and across population in order to find the desirable direction for improvements.

India has made a significant investment in its education. The government‘s flagship programme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is designed to ensure access, equity and quality in elementary education.

The nation now needs reliable information about students ‘achievement in order to judge the quality of education provided. The history of NAS Carried out as part of SSA, the NAS aims to collect reliable information about the achievement levels of students in government and government-aided elementary schools.

 In 2000, NCERT‘s NAS programme was incorporated into the SSA programme. The plan was to carry out three NAS cycles, each cycle covering three key grades:

 • Class III,

• Class V,

• Class VII/VIII.

All three Classes are tested in mathematics and language. In Class V, students are also tested in environmental studies (EVS), while Class VII/VIII completes tests in science and social science. The Baseline Achievement Survey (BAS) was carried out in 2001-2004, followed by the Midterm Achievement Survey (MAS) in 2005-2008.

The experience gained through these initial two cycles made the value of the NAS clear, and the surveys were made an ongoing feature of the national education system.

NAS findings would help diagnose learning gaps of students and determine interventions required in education policies, teaching practices and learning. Through its diagnostic report cards, NAS findings help in capacity building for teachers, officials involved in the delivery of education.

QUESTION BANK

Question Bank is a collection or reservoir of questions for timely use. But haphazard collection of question will not make a Question Bank.

 The questions in a Question Bank must be reliable and valid and should be suitable for testing different traits and the candidates.

 Therefore, each question in a Question Bank is scrutinized on the basis of its quality and relevance and is included in the bank only after assigning technical values to enable the users to use them according to their requirements.

The technical specifications help the user of the bank to understand the type of question, what it test, to which level it is applicable etc.

 These statistical specifications further help in standardizing the questions are processed through field trial to derive certain statistical specifications such as difficulty level, discriminative index etc., these statistical specifications further help in standardizing the question banks and increasing their utility.

Technical value includes code number, subject, topic, date of writing, type of question, objective tested, level of question, time required for answering, marks allotted, difficulty level, discriminative index etc.

A question bank once made is useful for future. Maintenance of a question bank is a continuous process, because with the passage of time many items/ questions become outdated and need to be removed and many news items/questions need to be added to the question bank.

One of the important criteria for a question bank to be of good value and utility is the number of questions it contains. The greater the number if questions, the more valuable it will be. If the question banks are not large, choice of questions will be severely curtailed for the examining bodies and more importantly the students who use the question bank may mug up all the questions and their answers before appearing for the examinations, this will defeat the whole purpose of examination. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that the bank have a large number of questions.