The National Council for Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) standard-setting body is learnt to have written to the Union Ministry of Education (MoE) seeking it to urge state governments to give a formal go-ahead to the respective state boards to implement the recommendations of the ‘Equivalence’ report released by it last month that showed gaps in the performance of students from these boards.

The recommendations are part of educational institution reforms proposed under the new National Education Policy (NEP) and the National Curriculum Framework-for School Education (NCF-SE).

While the state boards are “willing” to implement the suggestions, they require a formal approval and notification from their respective governments to do the same, News18 has learnt.

“We have requested the ministry to urge the state governments to acknowledge the same. In the meantime, it’s suggested that they can start with working on preparing question banks for the senior classes, one of the crucial measures highlighted in the report,” said an official familiar with the matter.

PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), a constituent unit of the NCERT is tasked with setting standards and guidelines for student assessment and evaluation for all recognised school education boards in India.

This national assessment body had released the ‘Establishing Equivalence Across School Boards’ report, which showed variation in performance of students not only across state boards, but even within the boards.

Some of the key recommendations of the report included school boards going for a cumulative system of assessment where the performance of students in classes 9,10 and 11 counts towards the final assessment in class 12. It also suggested a more demand-based exam system as well as that the boards develop a cadre of ‘professional paper setters’ in order to standardise the assessments in classes 9 to 12. For standardising the question papers, it suggested that for classes 9 and 11 the boards develop a question bank for all subjects for the year-end examinations.