Kathmandu, April 7:

The Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) plans to introduce Continuous Assessment System (CAS) by promoting students of grade I to grade II without having students to sit for the examination. Under the CAS, they will be promoted on the basis of their class assessment.

Laba Prasad Tripathee, MoES spokesperson said the government is planning to introduce CAS and Liberal Promotion Policy (LPP) from this year. He added that the move would help to increase the enrolment rate to 100 per cent by 2015. At present, the net enrolment rate is 86 per cent in grade I.

“It would help ease the placement for new enrolments along with increasing number of enrolment in the country as a part of ongoing enrolment campaign,” said Tripathee.

“Various studies show that the dropout rate in grade I is high due to the high failure rate. Hence we are introducing CAS and LPP in order to reduce the dropout rate,” said Tripathee.

The ninth five-year plan had made specific mention of introducing CAS and adopting the LPP at the basic primary level (grade I to III). The MoES introduced the project with financial support from Finnish development agencies in five compulsory primary education (CPE) districts — Ilam, Chitwan, Syangja, Surkhet and Kanchanpur in 2001-2003 as a pilot project. CAS is an assessment carried out by the teacher while he or she is engaged in teaching and learning activities intended to improve the quality of teaching and learning. It is a part of a student- centric teaching methodology. Students are upgraded through their assessment without any written examinations.

Under CAS, students are assessed on an ongoing basis, preferably informally and using the teacher’s own judgement, with the teacher then modifying the lessons according to the strengths and weaknesses of individual pupils.