Click to play videoBangalore: Union Human Resource Minister Kapil Sibal is on a mission to clean up and and de-stress the education system. Sibal on Monday announced that the Class X Board exams would be optional in all the Central Board of Secondary Education-affiliated schools from the next academic year.
However, the Karnataka government is bringing in a tougher exam pattern from year for its state board students saying that a little stress is good for students and would help students perform better.
In the new pattern Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB) has decided to cut down the number of marks given to objective type multiple choice questions.
For the last three years, the KSEEB had brought an exam pattern where 60 per cent of marks went to multiple-choice questions.
From this year, KSEEB has decided to bring in a pattern where 75 per cent of marks will be awarded for long answers and just 25 per cent will be for objective questions.
The move would make it tougher for students to score marks, but teachers say that the new pattern was designed to keep students on their feet.
“Why can't we raise the bar? If we do, children can aim at it, if we reduce the bar, they only aim at that,” said Sri Kumaran's Children's Home Headmistress Padmaja Menon.
For the last three years, KSEEB has tried many experiments to de-stress class X exams in an effort to push up the pass percentage, especially among rural children. But those experiments have failed and the effort now is to improve the quality of education by making exams tougher.
“Because of this dilution like multiple choice questions, the quality of education is suffering and that is reflected in performance at the plus-two level,” said Commissioner for Public Instruction BA Harish Gowda.
So while CBSE students across the country have been celebrating Sibal’s new reforms which made class X board exams optional, Karnataka students are preparing to put in more effort.
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The Karnataka board is also doing away with the trimester scheme where students wrote exams every three months and weren’t expected to remember what they'd learnt at the end of the year.
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