CBSE to make the board exams a bit tougher

Now, scoring in the CBSE Class 12 board examination is going to be a little more difficult than normal. The exam pattern has been changed, replacing the objective-type questions to an application-based ones.

Also the number of “long answer” questions for the subjects like political science, economics, business studies and accountancy has been increased while the number of “short answered” questions is reduced. The same changes were noticed in the recently held pre-board exams.

The increased number of “long answer” type questions may please the college teachers, especially those concerned to social sciences, but some school teachers feel that theses kind of unexpected changes defeat the purpose of the continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) system, that aims at reducing stress.

The political science paper will have 27 questions instead of 31. In the same way number of questions in  mathematics paper has been reduced to 26 instead of 29. Earlier every “long answer” question had a choice but now the students are finding it difficult to make a choice among six-mark questions.

In the accountancy sample paper, more than half the number of questions was based on higher order thinking skills (HOTS). A school teacher said, “ This pattern of exams will badly affect the performance of those students who find it difficult to absorb the concepts quickly." 

Suma Padmanaban, principal of Asan Memorial Senior Secondary School said, “ In the board exams such difficulty level is very obvious to test the thinking level of the students. Text based questions are included only to help the students weak in academics.

According to a CBSE official, "The whole idea is to replace the  rote-learning by the exploratory and evaluative lessons."