The state Higher Secondary (HS) council on Thursday scrapped its decisions to set a word limit for the answer to each question in next year’s exams and conduct the test with “question-cum-answer booklets”.
The council revoked the decisions following a directive from the education department, asking it to stick to the current system of stipulating a word limit only for a few questions and providing separate answer scripts to examinees.
“The Higher Secondary exams will be held with old-style answer scripts in 2020. Question-cum-answer booklets (QCAB) will not be used. Some questions, not all, will have word limits mentioned for their answers,” said Mahua Das, president, West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.
The heads of many schools had recently appealed to the school education department not to implement the new system next year. “Next year’s HS exams start on March 12. We do not have enough time to familiarise the examinees with the new system,” said the head of a school in north Calcutta.
The school heads Metro spoke to said they were not opposed to the new system per se.
“The format is student-friendly. But students should get enough time to prepare for writing the exam in this format. We hardly got any time for that,” the headmaster of a school said.
Schools had told the government that the students would have got a hang of the new format if it were followed in the selection tests.
The council, however, asked the schools to conduct the selection tests with separate answer scripts, not QCABs. The selection tests are to be held over the next two weeks.
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.
A circular had been sent to the heads of all schools stating that there would be a word limit for the answer to every question in next year’s HS. The heads were asked to make their students practise how to write answers within the prescribed word limit in all subjects.
The council had sent a circular to all schools before Durga Puja specifying the word limit for the answers to various questions.
The circular stated that the word limit for the answer to a question carrying four marks is 80. The limit for a question carrying five marks is 100 and for the ones carrying six and seven/eight marks are 120 and 150, respectively.
In the HS, students are not asked to write long answers. The maximum marks a question carries is eight. However, in some subjects in commerce, one or two questions carry 10 or 15 marks. According to the circular, the word limits for a 10-mark and 15-mark question is 200 and 300.
The headmaster of another school said: “Students need to practise a lot in order to abide by the word limit. We wanted the new system to be deferred to avoid confusion among students during the board exam.”