Kapil Sibal's Gamble

Our Union Ministry has decided to end the class X exams, replacing it instead by Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation. The ministry thinks that the class X exam is stressful to the students and that they face needless pressure to perform well in their exam, which affects their mental health, etc. Yes, the students do face needless pressure during the exam period, but the pressure is escalated by their respective parents who want their child to be the next Einstein or Newton.
The Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) thing is a brilliant idea to judge the overall development of the student. Educationalist have stressed that it is a better way of evaluating a student than conventional exams. But with no standardisation, the CCE would be a failure as each school assessing a each student differently. The point that the Ministry is banning the class X exam and not the class XII exam itself suggests that the Ministry is unsure whether CCE is the right approach or not. Stress is stress whether the student is facing it in class X or Class XII, on the contrary the stress faced by the student in class XII is much greater than class X .
In my view both the conventional exam and CCE should be used to evaluate the performance of the student. The Ministry says that mugging up the textbook two months before the exams is not going to produce the desired results, but they fail to see that the pattern of the exam itself encourages students to mug the textbook up in order to get maximum marks If the board sets the paper in such a way that it encourages understanding of the subject and application of the knowledge gained throughout the year rather than mere reproduction of the facts stated in the textbooks (some of which turn out to be wrong), the desired results can be obtained