KOLKATA: The first semester examinations of CBSE and CISCE boards that will be based on multiple-choice questions (MCQ) will be helpful to students who are finding online-based teaching in the Covid year challenging, but they will need to learn how to manage time well and quickly select the correct answers, schoolteachers said.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has decided to conduct the class X and XII examinations in the MCQ format, and term 1 will cover 50% of the syllabus.
CBSE will use a combination of intelligent character recognition (ICR) and optical mark recognition (OMR) techniques to evaluate students’ performance in the MCQ pattern and the subjective part will be held next year in March-April.
According to principals and teachers, the new pattern will be more student-centric, transparent, technology-driven and future oriented.
Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), too, has decided to go the same way. Students will have to answer multiple-choice questions for 40 to 80 marks, depending on the subject.
Sujay Biswas, principal of Rammohan Mission High School, affiliated to CISCE, said, “The council has arranged a series of training sessions for teachers to guide them about new patterns and had sent specimen questions after declaring the decision, which was very helpful for the students to understand the question pattern. We have distributed the sample questions among students and have arranged a few mock tests so they can learn how to tackle the new system.”
Case-based MCQs have been introduced in the examination and most of the teachers said the main objective of this format will be to test the analytical power of students. Moreover, in the MCQ pattern, students have to provide reasoning, which will help them tackle competitive examinations in future.
Jonaki Mukherjee, a teacher of social sciences at DPS Ruby Park, affiliated to CBSE, said, “Students can score good marks and they have adopted the new procedure. But we had to work hard to prepare them. We took many tests following the new pattern, so that students are well prepared to take the examinations. However, the OMR sheet is not new for students who have sat for the Olympiad.”
Tanusree Banerjee, a science teacher of a CISCE-affiliated school, said, “The MCQ pattern saves a lot of evaluation time. Moreover, using technology for evaluation, hopefully, will help us a lot.”
CBSE has published the date sheet for term 1 for classes X and XII and major subjects’ examinations will start from the end of November while CISCE has pushed back the first-semester examinations.
