ICSE council prepares for paper tweak

The ICSE council is preparing resource materials for critical-thinking questions and specimen papers for schools to use for their “internal assessments”, the council chief said on Tuesday.

The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) said that the share of such questions would go up to 20-25 per cent in the 2025 boards.

The share of critical questions was 15 per cent in the 2024 examinations.

“We are developing resource materials to promote competency-based questions for schools to use in their internal assessments,” said Joseph Emmanuel, the chief executive and secretary of the CISCE.

Once the resource materials are ready they will be given to schools, a council official said.

Emmanuel said that the council had undertaken several activities to help schools and students tackle critical-thinking questions.

It includes capacity building of teachers through training and reorienting the teaching method.

Children would be expected to do more project work with the increase of critical-thinking questions in the exams, said the official.

The hand-holding has to begin from early years and go right up to Class XII, the council chief said.

The council published both the ICSE (Class X) and ISC (Class XII) results on May 6. The chief executive and secretary had then said the critical thinking questions were “well received” by schools and
the students.

“The critical-thinking questions had a positive impact on the results. We were apprehensive of the children’s performance, but they have done well,” Emmanuel had said.

Several schools said critical and analytical questions should feature more frequently in classrooms and not only in the half-yearly or final
examinations.

“We have told our teachers that there should be critical-thinking questions at the end of each topic or chapter. This year’s board question papers showed that some of the questions could be related to higher education, too. If we are to train our children accordingly we have to focus on in-depth study,” said Terence John, principal, Julien Day School Kalyani.

“Resource materials provided by the council would orient teachers to generate more such questions,” he said.

Teachers would have to do away with the practice of giving “suggestions”, said a school principal.

“Earlier, out of 10 suggestions provided by teachers, seven would appear in the board question paper. But neither students nor teachers can bank on that anymore,” said a principal.