Five years after Punjab had re-introduced board exams for class 5 kids, the state has again scrapped it. This year, for the academic session 2024-25, the annual evaluation of class 5 kids will be done by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), as it was done before board exams were introduced. It was in 2019-20 that the state had re-introduced board exams for class 5.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Amaninder Kaur, Director, SCERT Punjab, said that this year, the question papers for class 5 will be prepared by SCERT experts and not by the Punjab School Education Board (PSEB). “Everything else will remain the same,” she said.

In an order issued in this regard, the SCERT director has directed the district education officers (DEOs) across the state to start preparing accordingly. The order states that the kids will be evaluated as per the Learning Outcome Evaluation System (LOES), and will be tested in Punjabi, English, Hindi, Maths and Environmental Sciences. Each subject will have a 80-marks theory paper and 20 marks will be decided via internal assessment by teachers. The children will appear for exams either in their own schools or external centres but they should be very close to their own schools considering kids are very young, the order stated. Teachers will check the papers and upload marks online on the portal.

Punjab re-introduced board exams for class 5 and 8 in 2019-20 session after the Parliament had passed an amendment in the Section 16 of Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) Act in January 2019, scrapping no-detention policy and empowering the states to hold back students if they fail re-examination. Children still cannot be expelled till completion of elementary education, but will not be promoted to next class, if they fail re-examination too, which is held within two months after results are declared, as per the RTE amendment.

However, even before the Parliament scrapped the no-detention policy and amended the Act in 2019, Punjab had come up with its own LOES system in 2016 under which class 5 and 8 students appeared for exams conducted by the SCERT but were not expelled even if they scored the lowest ‘E’ grade (less than 33 per cent). They were only identified for “remedial coaching and extra attention”. The LOES was introduced after it was noticed that the learning outcomes levels were drastically declining and affecting class 10 board results.

Since 2020, PSEB has been conducting exams for class 5 and 8. However, this year, SCERT will conduct class 5 evaluation.