What NEP 2020’s Outcome-Based Education gets wrong about learning
This opinion piece critiques India's Outcome-Based Education (OBE) model under the National Education Policy 2020. It argues that the system encourages students to prioritize rubric compliance over genuine curiosity and critical thinking.
Why it matters
It highlights a growing concern in modern pedagogy regarding how standardized assessment metrics can stifle intellectual creativity and student autonomy.
When you posit an outcome in a specified future, you travel back from that future to the present to measure your present and ensure its attainment. This is no time-travel fantasy, but a peculiar logic within which the contemporary higher education system operates. Universities ask students to be creative, entrepreneurial, critical and capable of thinking beyond boundaries, while increasingly prescribing what they should learn, how they should show it, and how that learning can be reduced to measurable outcomes.
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