Exams
72nd of 74
India skipped the world's biggest school test. Then quietly started training for it.
7 min read Pawanchander Komuravelli
There’s a test your school will never make you sit, and the story of why is one of the most revealing things about Indian education.
For students
What PISA is
It’s run by the OECD, until recently every three years, and it checks whether 15-year-olds can apply reading, maths and science to problems they’ve never seen. Not recall. Apply.
India tried it once, in 2009, sending students from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, two states with decent reputations. The two states finished 72nd and 73rd out of 74, ahead of only Kyrgyzstan PISA 2009 coverage . In Himachal Pradesh, 57.9% of the tested students scored in science at a level you can’t tell apart from having learned no science at all. In Tamil Nadu, 43.6%. The comparable figure in the United States was 4.2%.
What India did next
It said the questions were culturally out of context for Indian students, and then it stopped showing up. India skipped 2012. And 2015. And 2018. It signed an agreement to return in the 2021 round with Chandigarh schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, but that round got pushed to 2022 by the pandemic and the comeback never happened. India stayed out of PISA 2025 too, while more than 90 countries and economies sat it.
Here’s the part that turns this from an embarrassment story into a policy story. While staying out of the exam, India started rebuilding its own exams to look exactly like it. A body called PARAKH, working with ETS, the people behind the TOEFL, is retraining all 69 school boards to write application-based, competency-style papers PARAKH coverage . Your CBSE papers going half competency questions? Same project. The two-board-exam reform? Same family.
One last wrinkle
Some of India’s elite private schools have already run the OECD’s school-level version, PISA for Schools, on their own rupee. So the top slice of the system is quietly benchmarking itself against the world while the system as a whole stays home.
Sources
- OECD PISA programme The OECD PISA home page. Programme design, participants, and cycle years.
- The Leap Journal Analysis of India’s 2009 result: the ranking of 74 regions, and the 57.9% / 43.6% / 4.2% science figures.
- ThePrint PARAKH aligning India’s 69 school boards toward competency-based question papers, with ETS.
- The Wire India's decision to sit out PISA 2025.
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