By IANS
New Delhi : The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will set questions in the upcoming examinations to evaluate students’ thinking skills. Over 1.3 million students of Classes 10 and 12 will appear for the examinations this year.
CBSE chairman Ashok Ganguly said the board has redesigned the question paper of all the major subjects like mathematics, science, English, and social sciences.
“The new design includes about 10 percent of very short sample questions and about 20 percent questions on High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS),” he said.
“It will help gauge students’ ability to reason, justify, analyse, process and evaluate information and knowledge. The format of the question paper will have both very short answer type and long answer type questions,” he told reporters.
This year 1.31 million students will appear for Classes 10 and 12 examinations w this year – 765,095 appear for Class 10 and 548,815 for Class 12.
Last year, 705,152 candidates had appeared for Class 10 examinations both in India and aboard while 502,688 students had taken Class 12 examinations.
CBSE officials said this year the number of physically challenged students have gone up from last year in both classes.
The exams for both levels will start March 1.
“Class 10 students from 8,199 schools will appear for the exams in 2,624 centres. Similarly, Class 12 students from 5,171 schools will write their papers from 2,394 centres both in India and abroad,” Ganguly added.
In an innovative step, Ganguly said the answer papers of students from both classes will be put up on the CBSE website. “This will give access to the answer papers and students can see why and how the candidate has secured such good marks,” he added.
In order to make the evaluation system flawless, the board has given marking schemes in major subjects like Science, commerce, humanities in Class 12 and all subjects for Class 10.
For the smooth conduct of examinations and marking, the board has appointed school principals as chief nodal supervisors for evaluation purposes.