Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) of India has decided to introduce an on-screen marking system for some subjects of Class XII from the 2013-14 academic year, a senior official said. This will bring more transparency to the evaluation process, CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi said, adding there were cases of discrepancies in awarding marks especially where there is scope for subjectivity.Joshi is in Doha for a training session of CBSE International Curriculum teachers. He said the new system was tested for the Class X board examination of the Delhi region last year. “Last year 250,000 answer books were scanned and given to two teachers each for evaluation. If there was no great difference between the two evaluations, the higher score was accepted. If not, a third person was assigned to evaluate the answer book,” Joshi told in an interview. He also said that more training of examiners and evaluators are also planned to solve the issues related to evaluation. The idea of on-screen evaluation came up as there was no revaluation system in CBSE, though students can access their examination books after the marks are awarded. Joshi said this was done successfully without any complication and it will be applied for some subjects of class XII from 2014. “It is sure to be implemented for English in Class XII from next examinations,” he added. The CBSE chairman also said that there was no plan to make the Class XII examination a graded one in the near future. “For higher education most of the universities or institutions insist on numerical scores. This makes it difficult to replace marks with grades for Class XII. We have plans to make Class XII graded but not very soon. We are consulting with the higher education officials to find a way out to solve the issue. When they come out with a suitable scenario we will implement grading in Class XII.” As for the Open Book Examination system, introduced recently by the CBSE, the official said it will be implemented from this academic year for Classes IX and XI. “This is not an open book examination but open text assessment,” Joshi said. “For Class IX, this will be part of the summative assessment of the second term and for the final examination for grade XI. This will be based on case studies given to the students which are part of the curriculum of each subject.” Joshi said a certain percentage of the examination will be allocated for this and case studies are given three-four months in advance on some real issue. “The issues will be connected with all the concepts taught to the students. They are not general case studies but cases related to topics in the subjects. The case studies are connected with the syllabus.”He also pointed out that sample question papers will be given to students. “These are real studies or real life situations and connected with the syllabus. But the questions will be out of the textbooks. A circular is on our website and parents can access it to have a better idea about the concept,” he added. Source : Qatar Chronicle

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