Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) was introduced by the Government of India to improve standards in teaching. It is an immediate outcome of the Right to Education Act, 2009 (RTE) which requires the recruitment of many teachers across the country in a time-bound manner. 

The test is mandatory for teachers who teach from grades 1 to 8 and is conducted by both the Central and state governments in India. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 highlights the need to strengthen the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) conducted at both, the state as well as the central, levels to ​‘inculcate better test material, in terms of content and pedagogy.

The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) Sikkim has collaborated with Azim Premji University in revamping the Sikkim state Teacher Eligibility Test (STET) to improve the quality of teacher recruitment in the state. 

The University has been working collaboratively with the state working group on STET from March 2020 onwards. The nature of the collaboration was multi-layered in order to ensure a holistic approach towards revamping and strengthening STET. 

A phase-wise restructuring of the STET syllabus and test development processes was undertaken across a period of 2 years with a few key milestones highlighted below. 

The restructuring process resulted in a series of resources that were generated with the specific purpose of contributing to more robust and well-structured test development processes for future STET cycles. 

All the resources created are in alignment with the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) guidelines for conducting TET. The resources could serve as a ready reference for other states who intend to reform their state-level TETs by developing better quality test materials. 

The resources developed as part of the project can be accessed below:

The Syllabus document provides a comprehensive list of subject-wise topics and subtopics that prospective candidates will be tested on, both in terms of their content knowledge as well as pedagogic content knowledge. 

The Assessment Framework document presents a subject-wise list of assessable competencies that can be tested in a candidate. The competencies present a range of knowledge skills and dispositions within a content domain at varying levels of cognitive complexity.

The Item Bank is a collation of subject-wise sample items that demonstrate the alignment of test question to the competency, cognitive level, and nature of knowledge that it intends to test. It attempts to showcase a variety of multiple-choice questions per subject that can be effectively used to test both content and pedagogic content knowledge of candidates for both primary and elementary levels.

The Test Development Process Handbook for Experts details the key stages of the test development process in the context of TET. It intends to provide a detailed understanding of key principles and guidelines to be followed at each stage of test development in order to develop a valid and reliable test paper.