Tamil Nadu Scraps Class XI Boards, Announces New Education Policy

On August 8, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin dismantled a piece of the state’s educational edifice. The Class XI public examination, the mid-course crucible between the Class X boards and the final Class XII trial, would no longer exist. From this year on, the space between the two major exams would be left to the rhythms of classrooms, the judgement of teachers, and the slow accrual of projects and assignments. Stalin spoke of pressure lifted, of students freed to cultivate skills and curiosity untrammelled by the next set of question papers.

The announcement arrived folded into Tamil Nadu’s State Education Policy (SEP), a document written in deliberate counterpoint to the Union government’s National Education Policy of 2020. Where the NEP builds a staircase of national assessments in Classes 3, 5, and 8, the SEP removes them. Where the NEP insists on a three-language formula, the SEP holds fast to Tamil and English. Coaching centres, tolerated elsewhere, would be banished in Tamil Nadu. The subtext was clear: here was pedagogy as an act of federal self-definition, the Dravidian movement’s belief in social justice and linguistic pride translated into the architecture of schools.

The Class XI public exam was not an ancient pillar, but a recent construction. In 2017, the AIADMK government, under education minister K.A. Sengottaiyan, introduced it to compel seriousness, align the state syllabus with the CBSE’s, and offer a common standard for universities and employers to read. In 2018, the first batch sat the new paper.

Seven years later, the results resist simple readings. Class XII pass rates rose from 92.1 percent in 2017 to above 94 percent in 2024. NEET qualification rates climbed more sharply, from under 39 percent (2018) to around 54 percent (2023) over the same span. But between those numbers lie too many moving parts: the 7.5 percent medical-seat quota for government-school students, the expansion of state-run coaching, annual shifts in paper difficulty. The gains, where they exist, cannot be pinned solely to the Class XI board. Meanwhile, the Justice A.K. Rajan committee’s work showed that Tamil-medium and rural students—once more visible in medicine—were vanishing from admission lists in the NEET era.

Stalin’s repeal sets Tamil Nadu in a line of jurisdictions recasting the weight of midstream examinations. In Singapore, mid-year exams have been stripped from primary and lower-secondary years, to create space for what officials call “deeper learning”. In Scotland, the Hayward Review has nudged the senior-phase qualification toward continuous assessment, though the government keeps a portion of external exams to anchor standards. New Zealand is paring back Year 11 assessments to focus on literacy and numeracy.

Removing high-stakes checkpoints can release time and lower stress, but without rigorous moderation the quality of assessment fractures along school lines. In Tamil Nadu, the SEP promises competency-based evaluation and some form of monitoring, but the machinery is still a sketch. The question is whether a mark from a Chennai corporation classroom will carry the same grain of credibility as one from a private school in Coimbatore, and whether universities will believe it.

It must also be said that less than a year from the Assembly elections, the gesture plays to parents weary of back-to-back board seasons, and to a base attuned to every act of defiance toward Delhi’s NEP. Yet it has not won universal assent even within the ruling coalition. D. Ravikumar, an MP from the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), an ally of the DMK, has warned that dismantling the Class XI exam could weaken academic rigour and erode preparedness for higher studies, urging Stalin to reconsider. Whether the chief minister’s new policy will deliver better learning, or simply better optics, will be known only after a generation has passed through the interlude of Class XI without the old anxiety, and without, perhaps, the old guardrails.

board examsClass XIMK StalinState Education PolicyTamil Nadu