The Higher Secondary selection tests will be conducted with old answer scripts, not the Question-cum-Answer Booklets (QCABs) the students have to write on in the Plus II exams next March, officials said.
The state Higher Secondary council, which conducts the exams, will issue QCAB samples to the schools before the tests.
The heads of many schools told Metro they were expecting that the selection tests would be held with QCABs so the examinees got a hang of the new format that would make its debut in HS 2019.
Council officials said QCABs would not be used in this year’s selection tests, to be held “internally” by individual institutions, to avoid confusion and complications.
There are around 6,750 Higher Secondary schools in the state.
“It is not possible for the council to ensure that all 6,750-odd institutions follow the new format in the selection tests. A student will form a wrong idea about the system if a school deviates from the format. That will result in confusion, which will affect the student’s performance,” a council official said.
The selection tests will be held in November, after the Puja holidays.
The council this year decided to do away with answer scripts and ask the examinees to write the answers in the space provided in the question booklets.
Till HS 2019, each question paper was split into two parts. Part A consisted of long-answer type questions which the examinees had to answer on separate answer scripts.
Part B contained multiple-choice and very short answer-type questions which had to be answered on the question paper.
The examinees had to tie the answer scripts with the Part B question paper and hand the two to invigilators at the end of each day’s test.
In the new system, the two parts will be merged into one.
“We will issue a notification containing elaborate instructions about the use of the QCAB after the Puja holidays,” HS council president Mahua Das said.
“The council has introduced certain important changes. For example, for the first time we will specify the word limit for each answer. Each and every student must know about these changes before they write the board exams. Teachers will be required to go through the instructions and inform the students so they don’t have any problem writing the answers in the new format,” said Das.
The heads of many Higher Secondary schools said the students would have benefited had they been allowed to write the selection tests in the question-cum-answer booklets.
“The examinees would have got a taste of the new system before the Higher Secondary board exams if we were allowed to use the question-answer booklets in the selection tests,” said the headmaster of a school in north Calcutta.
One reason for introducing the new system is to prevent question leaks through WhatsApp.
Till last year it was easier for the students to leak questions through WhatsApp because a single page contained a number of questions.
“Had an examinee clicked one page in the question booklet and spread the image through WhatsApp, a number of questions would have become public,” an official said.
In the new system, after every question there will be some blank space for the students to write the answer. A single page can have only one question and the rest of the page can be left blank for the answer.