What NEP 2020’s Outcome-Based Education gets wrong about learning - The HinduUpdated - September 09, 2026 12:08 pm ISTWhen every lesson is expected to produce a clearly measurable outcome, there is little room for suspenseful spontaneity that can often lead to a meaningful moment of learning. | iStock/Getty ImagesWhen 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.In one of my classroom conversations, I remember a student telling me that she had begun to approach every classroom assignment not by asking what she wanted to say but by asking what the rubric wanted her to say. She would open the assignment, then the assessment criteria and rubrics, and form her answer backwards. “I don’t want to transgress the rubrics and experiment anymore”, she said. “What if I write something different and lose marks?”(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)The student begins to see a difference between learning something because she is genuinely curious and learning just to earn recognition or approval from the system. When she learns out of curiosity, she is free to ask questions, make mistakes, change direction, and perhaps discover something she never expected to find. But when the goal is to meet a prescribed outcome, learning can become a matter of figuring out what the rubric wants and doing exactly that. In this context, the fear is not simply a fear about failure. It is about perpetually creating anxiety over stepping outside the boundaries of what the system has already decided counts as ideal success. This type of rubric-generated anxiety is completely understandable.Join THEdge LinkedIn groupbell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom offers a particularly interesting framework for examining Outcome-Based Education (OBE) as it has been framed into India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Against an education model increasingly organised around attainment, documentation and measurable performance, hooks explores an idea of education which is a practice of freedom. If the OBE model tells a student that learning must be demonstrated through measurable outcomes, and if those outcomes determine assessment, grades and progression, then it is a moment for self-introspection for all of us.Deceptively clean and neatAt first glance, the language of Outcome-Based Education appears very neat and clean. The OBE package offers learning outcomes, graduate attributes, upskilling of competencies, measurable attainment, employability, experiential learning and so on. At the level of implementation, the apparently flexible package within the OBE gets translated into an old model of bureaucratic rationality and the policy pressure eats up the creativity of many institutions of higher education.The OBE framework assumes that students are rational actors or predictable learners. Once you give them a clear outcome, a set of instructions, and a rubric, they will supposedly follow the path and turn learning into measurable competence. But that is not really the way people think or learn. Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive biases and Morgan Housel’s writing on the psychology behind financial decisions remind us that human beings are far more unpredictable. We are influenced by emotions, biases, habits, experiences, and things we do not always fully understand ourselves. Learning, like decision-making, rarely follows a neat and outcome-driven path.For bell hooks, the question is not merely what a student can demonstrate at the end of a course, but what kind of person that student is becoming through the experience of education. A classroom already contains relations of power where the teacher has institutional authority and students occupy different positions according to gender, caste/race, class, language, sexuality and cognitive ability. The teacher’s authority should be transformed from authority over students into authority in the service of learning. But with the gradual implementation of the NEP, the role of the teacher gets diluted to the point where results and rubrics dominate the field of learning.For hooks, a progressive classroom is not a collection of students competing for grades but a community of learners grounded in mutual respect, active listening, intellectual openness, and collective participation. Such a classroom encourages students to disagree thoughtfully, recognise differences, and take responsibility for creating a space where diverse voices can be heard.In hindsight, a classroom should not be reduced to a production floor where outcome-based competencies are manufactured and checked off. The classroom is a poetic space of encounter, vulnerability, dialogue, sudden surprises and transformations. This is the place of unthought outcomes where knowledge emerges through the unpredictable meeting of live experience and intellectual curiosities.Of course, universities must assess learning, teachers must remain accountable and students deserve clarity about what a course intends to accomplish. But the problem begins when standardized templates and compliance replace the nuances of learning itself. The point is not to abolish outcomes but to treat them as temporary coordinates rather than final destinations. Outcomes could be treated as markers of where a course begins, not boundaries on where learning must end. A laboratory should have room for anomalous results, just as a literature classroom should allow a text to remain unresolved. Universities should start asking whether their assessment criteria accommodate the question: what did students discover that we did not expect?A focus on documentationIn academic circles, one major concern with Outcome-Based Education is the sheer amount of documentation work that it demands. Teachers and university faculty have to spend more time mapping Course Outcomes and Program Outcomes, filling out various templates, collecting evidence, and preparing reports than actual teaching and engaging with students.What begins as an attempt to improve accountability can easily become a metrics-driven exercise in which having the right documents matters more than what actually happens in the classroom. Worse still, when students do not achieve the prescribed outcomes, the blame is often placed primarily on the shoulders of teachers or those who run the institutions. Needless to say, this is done at the cost of ignoring larger structural realities such as social background, unequal access to resources, funding disparities, language barriers, financial pressures, or differences in prior learning or cognitive abilities.Teaching rarely unfolds in a perfectly planned sequence. A student’s unexpected question, a lively disagreement, or a discussion that takes the class somewhere unanticipated can often become the most beautiful and meaningful moment of learning. But when every lesson is expected to produce a clearly measurable outcome, there is little room for such suspenseful spontaneity. The teacher begins to teach toward the prescribed template rather than toward the students in front of them. In the process, classroom teaching ceases to be about curiosity, exploration, and discovery and becomes more of a template-compliance exercise that ensures every learning experience ends exactly where the outcome statement said it would.This is where a fractal ontology offers a useful way of thinking differently. It suggests that reality does not unfold as a simple, linear progression from cause to predetermined outcome. Instead, complexity, difference, and new forms can continually emerge from relatively simple relations. Learning, too, can bring in such unthought possibilities: what begins as a planned interaction among teacher, student, and subject can yield outcomes no one could have fully anticipated.The greatest danger of an excessively outcome-oriented university is not simply the heavy burden of paperwork, but the bureaucratic elimination of surprise, unsettling doubts and curiosity from both the teaching and learning process.The Mandelbrot set offers a striking metaphor for crossing the boundary set by Outcome-Based Education: a simple mathematical rule, when you apply it repeatedly, produces an infinitely complex and unpredictable pattern. The point is not that the dynamic pattern invalidates any structure, but that its richness cannot be fully anticipated from one single rule alone. Learning works much the same way: we may design objectives and outcomes, but what emerges in the classroom, whether it be a new question, an unexpected connection or a sudden insight, cannot always be predicted and specified in advance.(Views are personal. Dr. Sudeesh K is a faculty member in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, Yeshwanthpur Campus)Published - September 09, 2026 08:30 am ISTSign in to unlock member-only benefits!Access 10 free stories every monthSave stories to read laterAccess to comment on every storySign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single clickGet notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products${ ind + 1 } ${ device }Last active - ${ la }