Term-1 board exams for Classes 10, 12 to be conducted offline; date-sheet on October 18: CBSE

NEW DELHI: The first-term board examinations for Classes 10 and 12 will be conducted offline in November-December and the date-sheet for the same will be announced on October 18, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) said on Thursday.

The board said the exams will be objective-type and the duration of the tests will be 90 minutes. The exams will start from 11.30 am instead of 10.30 am in view of the winter season.

Bifurcating the academic session, holding two term-end exams and rationalising the syllabus were part of the special assessment scheme for Classes 10 and 12 board exams in 2021-22 announced by the CBSE in July in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"After the conduct of the term-1 exams, the results in the form of the marks scored will be declared. No student will be placed in the pass, compartment and essential repeat categories after the first term. The final results will be announced after the first and the second-term examinations," CBSE Examination Controller Sanyam Bhardwaj said.

"Practical exams or internal assessment will be completed in schools before the first-term exams are over. The marks allotted will be 50 per cent of the total marks and mentioned in the syllabus. The schools will be informed separately about the full scheme so that they can make the necessary preparations," he added.

The CBSE is offering 114 subjects in Class 12 and 75 subjects in Class 10.

"The CBSE has to conduct the examinations for a total of 189 subjects. If the tests are conducted for all the subjects, the entire duration of the examinations would be about 40-45 days. Therefore, to avoid learning loss of students, the CBSE has decided that the subjects offered by it will be divided into two parts -- major subjects and minor subjects," Bhardwaj said.

"As the major subjects are offered by almost all the affiliated schools, the exams for these subjects will be conducted by fixing a date-sheet, as done earlier. Regarding the minor subjects, the CBSE will make groups of schools offering these subjects and thus, more than one paper would be conducted by the board in the schools on a day," he added.

Bhardwaj further said the second-term examination would be conducted in March-April, 2022 and whether it will be objective or subjective-type will depend on the Covid situation in the country.

The plans by the board to split the session into two terms had come against the backdrop of the pandemic, which forced the cancellation of board exams for some subjects last year and a complete cancellation of the exams this year.