The biggest argument in favour of a single high-stakes examination has been fairness and objectivity. Standardised written tests like the JEE, NEET and CAT, and even the standard 10 and 12 board exams, despite various challenges, have captured the imagination of the world for decades, and have been particularly useful in India. They provide a fair selection system for when the supply of talent is far greater than what institutions can absorb. They have been the basis for many families to leapfrog into higher standards of living or make bigger contributions.

In the last few weeks and months, the media and public have been deeply engaged with issues around examinations. The exam reforms committee led by Nandan Nilekani offers a lot of hope in strengthening technology and processes. Along with that, I would like to step back and ask a fundamental question.

What happens when one examination carries almost the entire weight of deciding a student's achievement, progression and future opportunities? Is this an opportunity for us to move to more multi-dimensional assessments?

NEP 2020 has already emphasised the importance of multi-dimensional assessments. Educators widely recognise that marks alone, even more so from a single exam, do not give a full picture of a student's skills, attitudes, growth and sometimes even conceptual understanding. But multi-dimensional assessments are challenging to implement. The more we understand these challenges, the more we question whether we should proceed or not. Today I want to delve into the implementation of this high potential and fundamental change - both the why and the how - in a system as large and diverse as ours.

Objectivity And How To Solve For It

The first major bottleneck cited against multi-dimensional assessments is objectivity. The original power of our standardised exams lay in the ability for every candidate to have an equal shot at success and through that socio-economic mobility. You could be a king's daughter or a factory worker's son, but what mattered was your ability to estimate how much the metal object would move due to the magnetic field and if that was enough to strike the block. Such access creates aspiration and moves an entire system. To use an analogy from teacher exams, when CENTA started its International Teaching Professionals' Olympiad (TPO), leading to global rewards, what was most powerful for a lot of teachers was the ability to access an international exchange programme or a big cash reward through objective criteria rather than nominations and interviews.

But with many of our standardised student exams becoming more predictable, coaching has already changed access and indirectly the objectivity. Add to that the dropouts that take place well before the school-leaving exams, and the argument of access and objectivity becomes even more unclear.

On the other side, rapid change in technology, especially AI, is leading to the question of what matters eventually - should one be able to estimate how much the metal block will move, or should one be able to design a product that uses this movement, which a market is willing to pay for? An interesting experiment to watch is the new ‘Degree Law' passed in China in 2024, where PhDs are awarded based on real-world product builds rather than academic dissertations.

If that kind of real-world application and integration across domains matter, then how does one assess those skill sets? Again, technology has brought an opportunity to do this at scale. For multi-dimensional assessments like projects, portfolios and products - which systems like the International Baccalaureate (IB) have been using by keeping small class sizes - AI can support evaluation at scale. AI can rate descriptive responses and classroom evidence against well-designed rubrics, flag inconsistencies, provide faster feedback and enable teachers to identify previously unseen patterns in student understanding. We may no longer need to ask, "is it better to be fair?" or "is it better to align assessments with the real world?". We may be able to do both at scale.

Are Our Teachers Ready?

The second major bottleneck to multi-dimensional assessments is teacher preparedness. Teachers will need to know how to design tasks and projects rather than knowledge-oriented questions, create rubrics, interpret student work and give feedback that improves learning. With CBSE increasing the weightage for what are called 'competency-based questions' in the board exam, we find that schools and teachers increasingly want training on the difference between 'competency' and 'syllabus' and how to teach and assess in a competency-based manner. That demand is telling: where change in assessments has arrived, the appetite to meet it in the classroom follows.

This brings us to the much-debated question of sequencing. Many systems prefer to first train teachers for a few years and only then change the examination model. But a counter-view, which global evidence supports, is that changing the examination model itself accelerates preparedness. Education researchers call this the 'washback effect': what an examination chooses to measure ends up shaping what classrooms teach, and how quickly they adapt to teach it. What an examination rewards is, in the end, what a system organises itself to deliver.

Towards a More Resilient System

The future of education isn't the abandonment of examinations, but rather their alignment with the skill requirements of the modern world. At scale, classrooms and teaching align with what is rewarded eventually.

The ideal system maintains selection when necessary, but doesn't force one examination to carry the entire burden of judging a student's capability. A more resilient model would allow written tests, classroom assessments, projects, portfolios, presentations, teacher feedback and technology-supported evaluation to work hand-in-hand. Such a system would recognise both the answer sheet and how the child's mind behind the answer sheet understands, applies, creates, communicates, reflects and grows over time.

The views expressed in this article are those of Ramya Venkataraman, Founder & CEO of Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA) Pvt. Ltd., the world's largest professional platform for teachers.