Can one examination define a lifetime of teaching? This question deserves serious consideration in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision making the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) mandatory for certain in-service teachers, with the compliance deadline extended to 31 August 2028. The objective of maintaining minimum standards in teaching is neither unreasonable nor undesirable. The intention behind TET is understandable.
The real concern is whether a single, standardised examination with a fixed qualifying benchmark can fairly determine the professional eligibility of teachers who have already spent decades in classrooms. Indeed, the official CTET framework describes TET as a mechanism intended to establish national standards and benchmarks for teacher quality. But a legitimate objective does not automatically make every method of achieving it equally fair. This is where the present controversy deserves a deeper conversation.
A teacher recruited years ago under the rules applicable at that time did not enter the classroom by deceiving the system. He or she was appointed through the qualifications and selection procedures prescribed by the government then. Many such teachers have now spent 15, 20, 25 or even 30 years teaching. Their professional life has been shaped not merely by textbooks but by thousands of lessons, examinations, parent meetings, difficult students, administrative responsibilities and the everyday realities of schools.
So, a question arises! Can the professional worth of a serving teacher, who has taught thousands of children for years, be reduced to whether he or she can secure 60 per cent in one eligibility examination at the age of 50 or 55? For a teacher in his or her fifties, with years of teaching experience behind them, should professional competence ultimately come down to securing 60 percent in one examination? The issue, therefore, is not about resisting accountability or lowering standards; it is about asking whether quality assurance can be achieved without disregarding experience, professional service and the human realities of teachers who entered the profession under earlier rules.
Just imagine telling a teacher who is 52 years old that the professional validity of those decades of service will now depend on clearing an examination. The problem becomes even more complicated when success is determined by a fixed numerical threshold. Suppose two teachers have identical academic qualifications and decades of classroom experience. One remembers the terminology of child development, pedagogy or educational psychology particularly well and scores 62 per cent.
The other, perhaps because of age, examination anxiety or simply because he has been away from formal examination preparation for decades, scores 58 per cent. Is the first teacher professionally eligible and the second professionally unfit? What exactly changed between 58 and 62 per cent? Did four percentage points suddenly transform one into a competent teacher and the other into an incompetent one? This is not an argument against assessment. It is an argument for better assessment. Human beings do not remain cognitively identical throughout their lives.
Ageing can involve changes in processing speed, working memory, attention and retrieval, although these changes vary considerably among individuals. More importantly, examination performance is influenced by familiarity with test-taking, preparation time, anxiety and the format of assessment. A teacher who has spent 25 years solving classroom problems may not necessarily perform optimally in a standardised written examination after suddenly returning to an examination environment.
Now, coming to the human dimension that is being overlooked in this whole process. Behind every TET form is a teacher sitting at home with a syllabus in front of him or her, wondering: “What happens if I fail?” Behind every practice paper may be a 50-year-old teacher trying to memorise concepts that were never part of the examination culture in which they were originally trained. Behind every result is not simply a number but a family, a salary, children’s education, household responsibilities and the fear of losing a career built over decades.
The Supreme Court itself acknowledged the predicament of long-serving teachers and recognised that dislodging teachers with decades of service could appear harsh, even while upholding the statutory requirement. That acknowledgement is important because it reminds us that educational policy is ultimately about people. Perhaps the answer is not to abandon TET, but to rethink its application. For fresh recruits, a rigorous combination of professional qualification, TET, subject competence, demonstration lessons and structured selection may be entirely justified.
For already-serving teachers, however, a different and more contextualised assessment could be designed. Their classroom experience, annual performance, student outcomes, professional development, classroom observation, teaching portfolios, peer assessment and demonstrated pedagogical practices could form part of a comprehensive competency evaluation. Why must everyone be measured with the same ruler when everyone is standing at a different point on the professional journey? A 23-year-old entering the profession and a 53-year-old who has spent three decades in classrooms are not the same assessment population. Equality does not always mean identical treatment; sometimes fairness requires context-sensitive treatment.
Looking at this issue through another lens, we are asking already serving experienced teachers to prove their professional eligibility through a test, while ironically at the same time, the basic eligibility for the post of General Line Teacher is simple graduation, which was just 10+2 until the 2014-15 recruitment. Neither B.Ed. nor CTET or STET is mandatory for new entrants under existing recruitment rules. In J&K, even today the basic professional degree, i.e. B.Ed., is NOT mandatory for the post of general line teacher.
If there is one issue that needs urgent attention, it is this inconsistency that creates a question which ordinary teachers are entitled to ask. If an experienced serving teacher must now prove eligibility through TET for survival in service, why should the system simultaneously recruit untrained teachers? The question becomes even more important in light of NEP 2020, which envisages the four-year Integrated Teacher Education Programme (ITEP) as the minimum qualification for school teachers after 2030.
Therefore, we should certainly protect the right of every child to quality education. But quality education cannot be built by creating permanent insecurity among the very people expected to deliver it. A teacher should not spend days wondering whether a percentage on an examination paper will erase decades of service. Let us test teachers where testing improves teaching; not merely where testing produces numbers. Let us demand standards from fresh recruitment. Let us strengthen professional development.
Let us assess serving teachers through methods that recognise experience as an educational asset rather than treating it as something that can be cancelled by a single examination. If TET is genuinely the benchmark of minimum professional competence, it should be applied prospectively and consistently; not perceived as a retrospective test of the worth of people who entered service under a different regulatory regime. Perhaps the most important question is not whether teachers should be assessed. It is whether we have the wisdom to assess them fairly. So, let us ask again: Can a Teacher’s Entire Career Be Reduced to One Examination?
(The author is a 2019 batch teacher (CTET qualified), now selected as a 10+2 Lecturer in Education through JKPSC and is currently pursuing Research at the Department of Education, Central University of Kashmir. Feedback: [email protected])
