PARAKH

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Three global educational non-profits — Educational Testing Services (ETS), American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) —have expressed interest in helping to set up India’s first national school-level examination and assessment regulator.

• The organisations approached the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), responding to an Expression of Interest (EoI) for selecting consulting services to set up the proposed regulator PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), which is envisaged as an instrument for “establishing comparative measures and equivalence” among school examination boards and promoting collaboration among them.

PARAKH

• PARAKH will be expected to address the issue of disparities in scores of students affiliated to different boards. 
• Also, it will not just conduct future rounds of National Achievement Surveys (NAS) and other surveys on learning  outcomes, but also review all aspects of the design and conduct of the NAS 2017/2018 and 2021 exercises and identify areas for improvement.
• Apart from holding NAS and Foundational Learning Study (FLN), PARAKH will also manage India’s participation in international assessments like: 

• Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 
• Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS),
• Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

About  global educational non-profits

• ETS is internationally recognised for conducting TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).
• GRE (Graduate Record Examination), which are gateways to higher education in top institutes worldwide.
• AIR and ACER are leading names in research on behavioural and social science domains and learning assessment studies.
• ACER, which is based in Australia, has an Indian wing. It is primarily known for conducting a set of benchmark tests for learning assessment in English, Mathematics and Science for classes III-X.
• AIR shot to fame in the 1960s after it carried out the biggest study of its time among high school students in the US on racial disparities and economic mobility among others.
• NCERT will develop and validate standards of assessment for all school stages and curricular areas of school education, based on NEP 2020.
• It will provide technical guidelines and inputs for boards to design, develop, and implement state-wide systems for measuring student learning aligned with state and national curricular standards