The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is planning to engage an agency to assess the English speaking and listening skills of its students at secondary and senior secondary levels.
Industry sources told Express that the British Council is also vying for this opportunity by positioning its products particularly Aptis to meet the CBSE’s needs.
The assessment of speaking and listening skills of students is to ensure that these skills are correspondingly acquired during the transaction of English language curriculum in classes. Sources said that CBSE has the responsibility of assessing scholastic, co-scholastic and achievement levels of students of more than 13,500 schools affiliated to it. There has been a longstanding view that CBSE must focus on assessing speaking and listening skills for qualification and summative assessments as much as for formative assessment.
Industry sources said tenders have already been floated in this regard. However, British Council officials refused to divulge details.
Aptis is an innovative assessment tool, designed to help organisations and institutions identify standards of English and select staff or students with the right skills. Aptis is used to benchmark English language levels of employees, potential employees, students or teachers. Developed by testing experts, Aptis is the regarded as being among the smarter methods to evaluate reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in English, a industry source said.