The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), on Wednesday, announced that the students of classes 10 and 12 who don’t reside in the same city as their schools, will be allowed to change their examination centre cities. This decision by the Board is applicable for the Term 1 examinations that will begin from the next month. Now, every school and student must keep an eye on the official website of CBSE – cbse.gov.in.
According to examination controller Sanyam Bharadwaj, the Board has noticed that there are students who are still not in the city where their schools are and are residing somewhere else. Keeping this in mind, the Board will inform these students to make requests to their respective schools to change the city of the examination centre. However, this will be notified at an appropriate time. Consequently, the schools will follow the instructions and forward the requests to CBSE via online means.
As and when the students receive any information in this regard, they will have to make requests to their schools within a very short duration. After the schedule gets over, no requests for change in examination centre city will be accepted. For class 10, the Term 1 board examinations will begin from November 30, 2021; while for class 12, the scheduled date is December 01, 2021.
In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, CBSE has adopted a special assessment scheme for classes 10 and 12. An integral part of this scheme was to bifurcate the academic session and conduct the examination in two terminals and rationalize the syllabus. The Term 1 examinations will follow an objective-type pattern and the total duration will be of 90 minutes. Unlike previous years, the examinations will start from 11:30 AM and not 10:30 AM considering the cold weather. Examinations for the minor subjects will be conducted by the schools and the question papers will be sent by the Board.
Amidst all these, students feel that the examinations should be conducted in online mode due to health concerns. If the Term 1 examinations are held offline, then it would lead to crowding in the schools which will further lead to the violation of COVID protocols. On top of that, the threat of the third wave of COVID-19 is still looming, and the vaccination process for the school students has not yet started. Some students have also stated that if the classes could be held online, then the examinations should also be conducted online.