The Boards Are Complicit

CBSE's competency theater. "What is photosynthesis?" in a farmer costume.

There is an old joke about an interstate police competition. Each state was tasked with catching a cheetah from the jungle — this predates the government's much publicised reintroduction programme, so we are talking about an animal that was, for all practical purposes, extinct in India. Every state returned empty handed. Except Punjab Police, who came back having rained lathis on an elephant until the elephant said — main hi cheetah hoon.

That is CBSE's competency framework in one joke.

The system needed a cheetah. It could not find one. So it beat something else into confessing.

Now, before we call this stupidity — let's be fair. The people who designed this were not incompetent. They were not malicious. CBSE Circular Acad-57/2022 is actually a serious document. They worked with the British Council, Azim Premji University, and ACER. They built over 1,500 sample assessment items. They launched a microsite with rubrics, lesson plans, and resources for teachers. The intent was genuine — stop testing memory, start testing application. Define learning outcomes in advance. Let students demonstrate mastery rather than completion.

That is a genuinely good idea. It deserved to work.

But here is what competency based education looks like when it meets the reality of a classroom. A student is given a passage about a farmer. Questions follow — inferential, analytical, application based. This is the case-based question format that now appears in board papers, CBSE's most visible proof that things have changed. And it has changed, technically. Except that preparing students for case-based questions has simply become its own form of rote learning. Here is the passage type. Here is how you identify the question pattern. Here are the four points you write in eight minutes.

The farmer is still in the costume. He has just been given a more structured script.

Somewhere between the policy document and the classroom, depth became activity. Understanding became documentation. Demonstrating mastery became performing the appearance of it. And teachers are not to blame for this either. When the system evaluates you on whether the activity happened — not on whether the student understood anything — you run the activity. You file the report. You move on. You have thirty five other students, four other subjects to coordinate, and a board exam at the end of the year that will test none of this and everything else.

The board exam is where the mask slips completely.

Whatever competency framework exists in theory, the terminal evaluation remains almost entirely memory based. Reproduce the definition. Identify the diagram. Attempt all questions from Section B. The farmer can take off the costume now — what matters is whether he can write four points on photosynthesis in eight minutes.

So teachers do what rational people do when given two contradictory mandates. They satisfy both, superficially. The activity happens. The notes get dictated. The competency gets documented. The exam gets prepared for. Everyone performs their role. The elephant says what it needs to say.

This is not a failure of individual schools or individual teachers. It is a structural contradiction that the boards have not resolved and, if we are being direct about it, have not seriously tried to resolve. There is a principle in research called Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The board set competency as the target. Schools optimised for the measure. The measure stopped meaning what it was supposed to mean. The competency framework and the board examination cannot both be true at the same time. One measures process. The other measures product. They are not aligned. They were never aligned.

And in that gap — between what the framework claims to value and what the examination actually rewards — sits an entire generation of students learning to confess rather than learn.

Main hi cheetah hoon.

The board's report will show competency based education is being implemented.

It will not show the distracted student in the third row.

It was never designed to.

Next up: "Focus Nahi Hai" Is Not a Diagnosis — when schools stop being accountable and start writing letters.