CBSE drops several elective, vocational subjects from Class XII syllabus
Class XII students in CBSE schools will not be able to opt for seven elective subjects and 34 vocational ones from the coming academic year.
Class XII students in Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools will not be able to opt for seven elective subjects and 34 vocational ones from the coming academic year.
Officials said the CBSE has withdrawn these subjects due to low-enrolment issues.
Schools have been advised to not offer philosophy, creative writing and translation studies, heritage craft, graphic design, human rights and gender studies, theatre studies, and library and information science as academic electives from the 2017-18 session. However, students who opted for these subjects in Class XI will be allowed to pursue them this year, and appear for board examinations too.
Subjects such as poultry nutrition and physiology, management of dairy animals, health education, communication, confectionary, music aesthetics, office communication, first aid and emergency medical care, and integrated transport operations have been removed from the vocational stream.
Students can check the entire list of withdrawn subjects by logging on to the CBSE’s official website.
HT had first reported the CBSE’s decision to review the vocational courses, in light of low-enrolment issues, on March 2.
Similarly, the board has remodelled the assessment scheme for schools offering vocational subjects as compulsory subjects under the National Skill Qualification Framework for Class X also. Under this, students will be able to take a vocational subject as their sixth subject – which will be an additional one. In case a student fails in any of the elective subjects – such as science, mathematics and social sciences – it will be replaced by the vocational subject opted by the student, and the marks will be calculated on that basis.
In this year’s class XII examinations, only six opted for retail services, 11 for health centre management, 16 for integrated transport operations, 34 for confectionary courses, and 55 for front-office operations.
There were about 100 courses on offer under the vocational stream. Trimming the courses would help the board reduce the examination schedule from 45 days to a month.
