No move to scrap class 10 exams

From next year, Class 10 examination for the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) schools in India will be optional and a nine-point grading system will replace marks, Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal said on Tuesday, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 30, 2009, 23:48:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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From next year, Class 10 examination for the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) schools in India will be optional and a nine-point grading system will replace marks, Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal said here on Tuesday.

“I am sure the two reforms will take off with the 2010 CBSE board examinations,” Sibal said.

The minister also rubbished claims that a national board for Class 12 examinations will replace all existing 42 state education boards. “There is no proposal like that on the ministry’s agenda,” Sibal said. “I had just said that having a national board for Class 12 would have been an ideal situation.”

The HRD ministry will start consultations with schools, teachers and parents from next week on making class 10 examinations optional. “There is no intention to push the reforms down anybody’s throat. We just want to have a child-friendly education system,” the minister said.

The Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), the country’s top education policy-making body, having state education ministers as members, had cleared the proposal to make class 10 examinations optional in 2005. Even the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) that frames syllabi for all CBSE-affiliated schools had recommended in 2006 that Class 10 examinations should be made optional to reduce the stress on children.

Sibal said the Class 10 examinations would be optional for those who wish to continue studying in the same school. For such students, promotion to Class 12 would depend on the score in the continuous internal assessment.

“For this, the school will have to develop a robust and transparent internal assessment system,” he said. The CBSE regulation for affiliation prescribes mandatory internal assessment for each student till Class 10.

The CBSE will, however, continue to conduct board examinations for students who wish to join professional or pre-university courses outside the school system.

From next year, a nine-point grading system will replace subject-wise marks in all CBSE schools. “Along with grades, we will also give percentiles for each subject to help students in getting admission,” said Vineet Joshi, acting chairperson of CBSE.

There is already a grading system till Class 9. Those securing over 90 per cent would get A grade, indicating their outstanding performance. Other grades would be A1, B, B1, C, C1, D, D1 and E.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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