More Internal Choices, Marks for Creativity: CBSE Board Exam Gift

The board has announced that students will be given more internal choices in the question paper.

(Photo: The Quint)

In its planned departure from traditional ways of conducting board exams for class 10 and 12, Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has decided to change the question paper and evaluation of answers on two levels this year.

The board has announced that students will be given more internal choices in the question paper, making the exercise more conducive and student-friendly. Introducing its first change in the question paper pattern, the board has pushed up the limit of internal choices in the question from 10 per cent to 33 per cent. Covering one-third of the question paper, the choices will be available to both class 10 and 12.

According to the officials, this will offer more flexibility to students who will write the exam.

More Marks for Creative Answers

In another significant change, CBSE has decided to award students for ‘creative answers’. While this can result in subjective interpretation of answers by the examiner, the board has decided to train examiners well for this move. Senior officials at CBSE have acknowledged that rote-learning is not the only yardstick to gauge intelligence in children.

“Students will be allowed to exercise creativity in answers from this year. The subjectivity in creative answers will of course vary and there is no measure to evaluate creativity in a set manner. We have trained the evaluators for this method and help students score more and judge them on their creativity,” said Anurag Tripathi, secretary, CBSE.

“Suppose for a question of five marks, a student was getting marks for answering it in a specific manner. A student who answered in unconventional creative ways was getting 3. By introducing this method, we will accommodate creative answers and a student might get full five marks,” Tripathi explained.