New Delhi: Education commissions of the past had agreed on designing question papers to evaluate the analytical skills of children, not their ability to memorise.

The Prime Minister has written a book on ways to battle exam stress and on Friday, he addressed students on the issue.

Academics believe that the preparation of question papers and training of teachers for effective communication in classrooms are key to address exam stress.

Prof. Krishna Kumar - former director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which publishes school textbooks - said questions that were more "thoughtful" should be asked and classroom teaching should be oriented towards encouraging the analytical skills of children.

"All the boards need to ask analytical questions in exam papers. The students should not be required to memorise and reproduce text," Kumar said.

He said NCERT textbooks had been designed to encourage critical thinking in students. However, classroom communication was not up to the mark because of poor training of teachers, Kumar felt.

"The teacher-education system is in a poor shape. It is because 80 per cent of teacher-training institutes are commercial private institutions," Kumar said.

The D.S. Kothari commission, whose report was used as the basis of the first National Education Policy in 1968, had stressed on exam reforms by making tests a continuous affair.

"A major goal of exam reforms should be to improve the reliability and validity of exams and to make evaluation a continuous process aimed at helping the student to improve his level of achievement rather than 'certifying' the quality of his performance at a given moment of time," it had said.

The National Curricular Framework (NCF), which was the guiding document for the preparation of school textbooks by the NCERT during the first NDA government's term in 2000, had also said "the focus of examination should be on conceptual understanding, rather than merely facts being memorised for an examination".

The revised NCF prepared by a panel under Prof. Yashpal in 2005 stressed on continuous semester-based evaluation. It suggested making exams more flexible and integrating them with classroom life.

Accordingly, the Right to Education (RTE) Act introduced Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation instead of the annual examination system. The Union government wants to amend the RTE Act that threatens the CCE.

A committee for the evolution of a draft National Policy on Education set up by the Narendra Modi government underlined the revamping of the question pattern too.

The committee headed by T.S.R. Subramanian said the current exam system was based on memorising.

"The exam system should be geared to test understanding rather than the ability to reproduce the textbook script," it said.

The committee recommended making classroom learning more broad-based rather than confining it to textbooks where teachers would perform the role of facilitators to enable self-learning by children.

The committee recommended a system of online on-demand board exam that would offer flexibility and reduce year-end stress for students and parents.

It said basic tables and formulae and other information should be provided in the question paper itself, so as to focus on the thinking skills of application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

Inputs from the report are being used for a policy document currently being prepared by a separate committee.