By IANS
New Delhi : The students of Class 10 and 12 will write Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) examinations for social sciences and fashion studies Monday.
A total of 1.3 million students are appearing in the board examinations for the Class 10 and 12 respectively at 2,624 and 2,394 centres, both in India and abroad.
The Class 12 examinations started with the chemistry paper while class 10 examinations began with ancillary papers like Elementary Business Saturday.
According to the CBSE officials, 765,095 students are appearing for Class 10 examination from 8,199 schools, and 548,815 students of Class 12 from 5,171 schools write the papers.
Last year, 705,152 candidates appeared for Class 10 examinations both in India and abroad while 502,688 students took the Class 12 exams.
This year the CBSE has redesigned the question paper for all 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).
As many as 2,200 students are writing the examinations in Dubai. There are over 110 schools affiliated to the CBSE in the Gulf countries of which 52 are in the UAE.
About 18,000 students have registered for the exams from the foreign countries.
The CBSE officials said that around 2,500 physically challenged students were appearing for the exams, including 373 visually challenged students in Class 10 and 214 such candidates in Class 12.
For the first time, 20 percent of the questions will be based on HOTS as prescribed by the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), the guiding document for preparation of NCERT textbooks.
A 15-minute cool off time, given to help students read and understand the questions, will continue as before.