“If We Want Teaching To Change, We Have To Change The Test First”
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Every few years, India renews the conversation on improving school education. Recent reforms have rightly focused on curriculum, teacher development, digital infrastructure and foundational learning. Over the past two decades, the country has achieved near-universal school enrolment of over 98 per cent among children aged 6–14, while initiatives such as the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, NIPUN Bharat and PARAKH have signaled an important shift towards competency-based learning and assessment. Yet one lever that ultimately shapes what happens inside every classroom still deserves even greater attention: assessment itself.
Think about what a test actually does. It tells a teacher what to spend the year on, a student what is worth learning and what can be forgotten after March and a parent whether their child is doing fine. Change the exam, and within a term the teaching quietly rearranges itself to match. Leave it alone, and no new curriculum will move the classroom very far. The test is the steering wheel. That is why nearly every major education reform from NEP 2020 and PARAKH to NIPUN Bharat places assessment at the centre of improving learning outcomes. For years we have been trying to change the car by polishing the seats. That is precisely why assessment reform has become central to India’s education agenda. The question today is no longer whether assessment should change, but how quickly classrooms can translate policy intent into everyday teaching practice.
Infrastructure, teacher quality and curriculum all matter. But one factor consistently shapes classroom behavior: what schools choose to measure. Assessment quietly determines where teachers spend their time, what students focus on, and ultimately what learning gets prioritised. For the same, three things stand out.
The first is that the exam, not the curriculum, sets the real syllabus. This July the National Education Policy turns six. The National Education Policy rightly shifts the focus from memorisation towards competency-based learning. The challenge now is ensuring that classroom assessments evolve at the same pace as the policy vision. Many classroom and school-level assessments continue to prioritise recall, making it difficult for teachers to consistently reinforce higher-order thinking skills throughout the year. A teacher knows the exam will ask students to define, list and reproduce, and they teach to that. It is hard to blame them; they are preparing students for the test those students will actually sit.
The second is timing. In most schools the real verdict on a child’s year shows up in the report card, months after the lessons that caused the trouble. By then the class has moved on and the gap has hardened. The 2024 Annual Status of Education Report found that almost half of Class 5 children in rural India, about 45 per cent, could read a simple Class 2 text. Gaps like that do not appear overnight. They build slowly, week by week, while everyone waits for the year-end exam to notice. A report card that arrives after the year is over is not a diagnosis but an autopsy.
The third observation is perhaps the most encouraging because it is also the easiest to act on. The schools that improve most consistently are not necessarily those with the most technology, but those that use assessment data effectively to support teaching decisions. Technology becomes valuable only when it helps teachers understand what each student needs next. They are the ones that check understanding of their students, and then take action on what student’s requirement. AI-enabled assessment systems can provide immediate feedback, identify patterns across classrooms and personalise support for students who are falling behind. Rather than replacing teachers, these tools strengthen professional judgement by giving educators timely evidence they can act on while learning is still taking place. As platforms such as DIKSHA increasingly incorporate adaptive assessments, the opportunity is to make feedback faster, more personalised and more useful for every classroom.
We often think about assessment the wrong way around. We treat assessment as the scoreboard, the number that tells you who won once the game is already over. It is really the steering wheel, the thing that decides where the car goes in the first place. A more effective way to change teaching is not by asking teachers to teach differently, but by changing what gets measured and how quickly feedback reaches the classroom, and how fast the result comes back, and the teaching reorganizes itself around it. Top down, the test is the fastest lever the system has. We almost never pull it.
Every major education reform we are proud of is ultimately realised through the assessments students take. Whether it is a new curriculum, better technology or greater investment, each reform improves learning only when it infl uences what and how students are assessed. If classroom assessments continue to reward memory more than understanding and application, they inevitably shape teaching in that direction. India has already begun reimagining assessment through initiatives such as NEP 2020, PARAKH and the growing emphasis on competency-based learning. The next phase is ensuring that these ideas are refl ected not only in board examinations, but also in the everyday assessments that shape learning throughout the school year. India has already built much of the policy architecture needed to support this shift. The next opportunity lies in using timely assessment, meaningful data and actionable feedback to help teachers respond to learning needs while they can still make a diff erence.
The author, Karan Gupta, is co-founder of AssessPrep
