PEC Background

Before the establishment of PEC, the examinations were organized by the Director Public Instructions (DPI) which provided guidelines along with Model Question Papers for Grade–V and Grade-VIII Examinations and the Executive District officers Education across the province were required to develop the question papers at their own level on the pattern of Model question papers and arrange the conduct of both the examinations in accordance with the guidelines given by the Directorate. However, uniform schedule for the conduct of Grade-V and Grade-VIII Examinations along with Activity Plan was provided by the Directorate of Public Instruction (EE), Punjab. The sample analysis of the examinations conducted in the districts depicted the following results.

• Overall quality of papers varied substantially.
• Question papers didn’t represent the curriculum.
• Some areas needed improvement, such as paper setting, marking schemes and consistency of the question difficulty with the children’s knowledge.
• Since each district was creating its own paper, examination results couldn’t be compared among districts. The district and school comparisons of results would have become possible only if all students were responding to identical examination papers.

In Dec 2005, a need for the establishment of an autonomous body was felt for the assessment of students’ learning achievement in the province. This idea was given the shape of reality with the approval of the Governor for the establishment of “Punjab Examination Commission” as an autonomous body on 16th January, 2006 with a challenging task to establish new setup and to organize Grade-V Examination 2006.

The newly born organization planned for the conduct of Grade-V Examination-2006. Dr.Ken Vine and Dr.Ted Redden, International Consultants with the collaboration of UNICEF organized training of Paper Setters and also trained the paper setters in making scheme. A team of Master-Trainers was developed for further providing training to the field staff.

Uniform question papers in each subject were developed for assessing the Learning Achievements of the students across the province and to have the comparison of student abilities on the basis of standard and uniform yard-stick.

The first ever newly established examination organization (PEC) provides the useful information i.e. children’s results/ performance, evaluation of intellectual framework and database to help to determine:

• School wise and gender wise performance of students.
• Comparison of results area wise, gender wise and public vs. private institutions.
• Areas needed concentration of the administrators.
• Areas wherein teachers require training.
• Short-comings/weak areas of contents/text-books.
• Which institutions & teachers require more support?
• Which institutions & teachers are already successful in their approach?
• The quality of education in schools of the Punjab.

PEC arranges training courses on the methodology of the new system of examinations for subject specialists, teachers, paper developers, examiners and paper markers. Master trainers have been trained by PEC to train head teachers in all the districts. The head teachers are then required to share their knowledge with their fellow teachers.

PEC is providing the Government with judicious comments on the quality of curriculum and would have an increasingly important role to play in relation to the quality of the curriculum change and to make the teachers training program effective and more realistic.