It appears that the Ministry of Education has made a risky and premature decision to replace the time-tested Number Grading System (NGS) by Letter Grading System (LGS) in the SLC Examinations without understanding  the implications and ramifications of this major change in the measurement and evaluation of the academic achievement of hundreds of thousands of students.

Educational reforms in the evaluation mechanism of education system should be initiated when there is a strong demand and need for reforms. In the case of this Letter Grading System, there is no demand from the guardians and teachers. The educational institutions which are almost monopolizing the credit for quality education have been opposing this change. These institutions have opposed this change with their understanding of the negative results of this change without any prior preparations. Their opposition to this change should not be ignored.

It is a change in the evaluation system where teachers will not think of numbers. They will evaluate and provide letters like A,B,C on the basis of their overall evaluation. Numbers will not interfere in the evaluation process. Our teachers who have been habituated with the number system cannot switch over to letters like A,B,C and, if they are forced to do so, they will not be able to perform this evaluation task precisely. Teachers have to be trained adequately and should be allowed to practice for some years. If they are forced to evaluate students in the LGS, their imprecise evaluation will affect thousands of students. If LGS is to be adopted, it should be started from grade 1, not grade 10. So, LGS should not be adopted at SLC.

A small experiment was done with a few technical schools which are not really representative. The curriculum and the teacher-learning practice in technical schools are completely different from others.

The letters given for numbers given also looks quite faulty. For example, A+ is given for those students scoring above 90 percent, A is given to those who score 80 to 89, B is given 60 to 69, C is given 40 to 49. But D is given to 20 to 39. There is no consistency. If a student gets D (GPA 1.6) should this person be considered as a pass student? This would mean that anyone scoring a D average has passed the SLC. Consequently, the quality of SLC graduates will decline. It will be a fatal blow to all efforts made to improve the teaching-learning situation in the community schools.