5 Hard Truths About Formative Assessment

Introduction: Beyond the Report Card

For generations, the Indian education system has been defined by a singular, high-stakes moment: the final exam. This historical reliance on summative evaluations has fostered a culture of rote memorization, where the ability to recall facts under pressure often overshadows genuine understanding. This “high-stakes exam culture,” as researchers call it, has been a significant source of stress and anxiety for students, prioritizing knowledge repetition over the critical thinking and problem-solving skills needed in the real world.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 represents a landmark shift away from this model. It promises a paradigm change, moving the focus from end-of-term judgment to a more continuous, holistic, and student-centric approach known as “formative assessment.” The goal is to transform assessment from a tool that simply measures learning to a process that actively improves it, giving teachers and students the real-time feedback needed to navigate the educational journey successfully.

While this shift sounds revolutionary, the path to implementation is filled with complex challenges and hard-won lessons from past reforms. The transition from an exam-driven system to one focused on continuous improvement is not as simple as changing a policy document. It requires a deep understanding of the systemic and cultural hurdles that stand in the way. Here are five hard truths that explain why this classroom revolution is at risk of stalling.

Five Impactful Takeaways on Formative Assessment in India

1. We’ve Been Here Before: The Cautionary Tale of CCE

The core idea behind the NEP’s assessment reform is not entirely new. It carries the echoes of a previous landmark attempt to overhaul the system: Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). Introduced under the Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009, CCE was a significant shift toward ongoing, holistic evaluation of both academic and co-curricular development.

However, despite its potential to transform Indian classrooms, CCE’s journey was fraught with difficulty. The policy faced significant implementation challenges across the country, which ultimately led to its discontinuation in many states. These hurdles included inadequate teacher training, severe resource and infrastructure constraints, and overwhelming administrative burdens on educators. This history serves as a critical cautionary tale, as the very same systemic roadblocks - from overloaded classrooms to a culture fixated on final exams - are the primary obstacles threatening the NEP’s vision today.

2. It’s Not About More Tests, It’s About the In-Flight Correction

A common misconception is that formative assessment simply means increasing the number and frequency of tests. This misses the fundamental purpose of the approach. Formative assessment is not about more evaluation; it’s about making evaluation more meaningful by integrating it into the learning process itself, not just tacking it on at the end.

The goal is to monitor student learning in real-time to provide ongoing feedback. An assessment only becomes formative “when the information is used to adapt teaching and learning to meet student needs.” One source offers a powerful analogy to clarify this concept:

My favourite way to help explain this is an Uber analogy. We take an uber ride to get to a destination, much like we go on a learning journey to get to a goal. Along the way, Uber tracks your journey and gives you feedback on how much progress you are making towards your goal. Imagine if Uber didn’t track your journey and only gave you a ‘Trip Summary’ after your journey ended? Without tracking the progress and feedback, we would probably have many people getting lost along the way or not reaching their destination at all!

Just as Uber uses real-time tracking to make course corrections and ensure you reach your destination, formative assessment tracks student understanding to help them reach their learning goals. This means that ongoing assessment is only truly formative if the data is tracked, reflected upon, and used to make necessary instructional adjustments.

3. The Biggest Hurdles are Systemic, Not Pedagogical

While teachers play a crucial role, the most significant barriers to implementing formative assessment are not rooted in individual pedagogical failings but in deep-seated systemic issues. Research consistently shows that even teachers with a strong theoretical understanding of formative assessment struggle to apply it effectively due to the challenging classroom realities in much of India.

Synthesizing findings from multiple studies reveals a consistent set of on-the-ground obstacles:

• Large Class Sizes: Providing individualized feedback and tracking the progress of every student becomes an exceptionally demanding task in classrooms with 30, 40, or even more students.
• Inadequate Teacher Training: Many teachers lack the necessary training and resources to design effective formative tools, interpret results, and provide constructive feedback, leading to inconsistent or superficial evaluations.
• Resource and Infrastructure Constraints: The effective use of modern formative assessment is often hampered by a lack of essential resources, including technological tools like smart boards, reliable internet access, and even basic learning materials.
• Time Constraints and Overloaded Curriculum: Teachers report that an overloaded curriculum, which must be completed within a specified time, leaves little room for the reflective, process-oriented work required for effective formative assessment. The pressure to simply “cover the syllabus” often takes precedence.

These are not new revelations; they are the persistent, unresolved fault lines in the system that led to the CCE’s discontinuation and now challenge the NEP’s reforms.

4. A System at War With Itself: The Learning Journey vs. The Final Exam

There is a fundamental conflict between the philosophy of formative assessment and the prevailing educational culture in India. Formative assessment is inherently “process-oriented” - it focuses on the journey of learning, identifying misconceptions, and fostering continuous improvement.

In contrast, the Indian education system remains overwhelmingly “outcome-oriented.” It is dominated by high-stakes centralized exams where the final score is the ultimate prize. This relentless focus on exam results undermines the value of formative practices for everyone involved - teachers, parents, and students. Teachers feel pressured by administrators and parents to prioritize covering the curriculum for the final test, rather than spending time on assessments designed for genuine understanding. This focus on the ‘prize’ is what fuels the pressure to ‘cover the syllabus,’ directly contributing to the time constraints and overloaded curriculum that teachers identified as a primary barrier.

5. The Final Paradox: Success Highlights a Deeper Flaw

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive finding is that the proven success of formative assessment reveals a deeper cultural flaw. One study found that students who participated in formative assessment activities scored significantly higher on subsequent tests than those who did not, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving academic performance.

However, the same study noted a critical paradox in its limitations section:

The results of formative assessment are never used for final pass or fail decision. So the students do not take them very seriously.

This observation is telling. The very feature that defines formative assessment - that it is a low-stakes tool for learning, not for final grading - can cause students conditioned by an exam-centric culture to devalue it. This paradox highlights a deep-seated societal view of assessment not as a supportive tool for improvement, but as a mechanism for judgment and ranking. For formative assessment to truly succeed, this perception of what assessment is for must change.

Conclusion: Re-imagining the Goal of the Journey

Successfully implementing the vision of NEP 2020 requires far more than a policy directive. The path forward is haunted by the ghost of past reforms, and success hinges not on new directives, but on dismantling old roadblocks. Unless the deep-seated cultural and systemic issues that doomed CCE - overcrowded classrooms, inadequate teacher support, and a societal fixation on the final exam - are decisively addressed, this new revolution is destined to meet the same fate.

The challenges demand a systemic overhaul and, more importantly, a cultural one. Beyond logistics, the national conversation about education itself must evolve. As India works to overhaul its classrooms, the real challenge is overhauling its mindset. Can we, as a nation, learn to value the journey of learning as much as the final destination?

References

1. Assessment Overhaul: How Private Schools are Changing the Game - Varthana
2. Assessment Reforms in Indian Education: A Study of NEP 2020 - Shodh Samagam
3. Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices
4. Decoding Teachers’ Dilemma: Unveiling the Real Obstacles to Implementing Formative Assessment in the Classroom - Journal of Qualitative Research in Education
5. Effect of formative assessment of students on their academic performance in Department of Kriya Sharir - IP Innovative Publication
6. Formative assessment in practical for Indian postgraduates in health professions education: A strategic initiative towards competency-based education
7. Importance of Formative Assessment in Modern Education - Square Panda India
8. Maximising student achievement with formative assessment - Times of India
9. A Study On Challenges Faced By Teachers Due To The New Education Policy (Kanpur Philosophers ISSN 2348-8301, Volume-X, Issue-I (K), 2023)