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.
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