The higher secondary council will request schools to distribute more than one set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in the first semester exams to prevent students from copying answers from each other, an official of the council said.

While the questions will remain the same, their sequence will vary from one set to another.

The council will tell the schools to prepare at least four sets of MCQs and distribute them in a way that the examinee seated next to each other get different sets, council secretary Priyadarshini Mallick said on Friday.

The HS course in the schools that follow the curricula of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education will be of four semesters from the academic year
2024-25.

The students will be tested entirely on MCQs in the first and third semesters. While the schools will prepare the questions in the first semester, the third-semester exams
will be conducted by the council.

“Since the responsibility of conducting the first-semester exams has been assigned to the schools, we will request the schools to follow the council’s system of preparing multiple sets of MCQs,” Mallick said.

“Students seated next to each other should get different sets. Such a system will help prevent copying and ensure transparency.”

An official in the council said that since the students will write the first semester exams in their respective schools, the institutions may want to be lenient to their students and not bother to prepare multiple sets of MCQs.

“We don’t want them to do that,” the official said.

In the second and fourth semesters, the students have to answer short answer and descriptive-type questions.

The schools will conduct the exams in the first two semesters and the council in the next two.

A student will have to write questions of 35 and 40 marks in the lab-based and non-lab-based subjects, respectively.

The students will write the exams in the first two semesters in their respective schools and the tests in the next two at away centres.