Soon after the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced to conduct the board examinations twice for the academic session 2021-21, thousands of Class 12 students begun posting memes on Twitter. While some are angry with the current batch of Class 12, others just laughed at the CBSE’s two board exams plan.
With continuing school closures and examination disruptions due to COVID-19, the CBSE has issued a new assessment scheme for Class 10 and 12 students this year.
In 2021-22, it will reduce the syllabus, hold board examinations twice during the year in different formats, and ensure continuous recording of internal assessment scores in order to have a variety of options to calculate a final score at the end of the year, according to a notification issued on Monday night.
“The syllabus for the Board examination 2021-22 will be rationalized similar to that of the last academic session,” said the notification. Last year, the examination syllabus was reduced by 30%.
The CBSE announced that exams for the first academic term will be held between November and December 2021, with a window of four to eight weeks for schools in India and abroad. “Dates for conduct of examinations will be notified subsequently,” it said.
“The Question Paper will have Multiple Choice Questions including case-based MCQs and MCQs on assertion-reasoning type,” the CBSE said. “Duration of test will be 90 minutes and it will cover only the rationalized syllabus of Term I only (i.e. approximately 50% of the entire syllabus).”
There will be no overlapping of the syllabus for the term exams, meaning second term exam papers will not include anything from the first term syllabus and vice versa.
The CBSE will conduct exams for the second term between March and April 2022. The board said that if the situation doesn’t permit holding a descriptive examination, students will take a 90-minute multiple choice questions-based test. The board said that students will take their exams at schools or designated centres if the Covid-19 situation improves.
If the second term exam can be held at centres in March-April 2022, its weightage in the final score would be more. On the other hand, if exams for the second term cannot be held in person, the weightage of marks of the first term examinations will be increased to provide year-end results.
In case the students have to take exams for both the terms from home, the CBSE will also factor in the students’ internal assessment, practical work and projects to ensure validity and reliability of evaluation.
