To hold exams or not: It isn’t an easily answerable question

The Supreme Court issued an interim stay on a Karnataka high court order which had allowed ‘board examinations’ to be conducted for classes 5, 8, 9 and 11 in schools in Karnataka. The Karnataka state government decided last year that annual examinations will be conducted for the four classes mentioned earlier. It goes back to the Right to Education Act 2009, whose clause 16 reads “no child admitted in a school shall be held back in any class or expelled from school till the completion of elementary education," and clause 30 reads, “no child shall be required to pass any board examination till completion of elementary education." It was to resolve this tangle that the Karnataka government decided to have annual examinations for these classes, while making clear that these are not board exams; these are only annual tests, and that children will not be detained on the basis of their results, which would only be used as feedback to inform students, teachers, the school and parents.