The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has announced significant changes to the assessment and evaluation practices for Class 11 and 12 board examinations. Starting from the 2024-25 academic session, the board exams will witness an increased emphasis on competency-based questions to foster critical, creative, and systems thinking among students.
Under the revised guidelines, competency-based questions, which include multiple choice questions (MCQs), case-based questions, and source-based integrated questions, will constitute 50% of the examination, up from the previous 40%. This move is designed to shift the focus from rote learning to understanding and applying knowledge in varied contexts. In contrast, the proportion of constructed response questions, such as short- and long-answer type questions, will be reduced to 30% compared to the earlier 40%. The allocation for select response-type questions (MCQs) will remain at 20%.
However, the CBSE has clarified that the composition of question papers for the year-end examinations/board exams (theory) for classes 9 and 10 will remain unchanged for the 2024-25 academic session. This decision underscores the board’s commitment to gradually transitioning towards a more application-based evaluation system.
“The main emphasis of the Board was to create an educational ecosystem that would move away from rote memorisation and towards learning that is focused on developing the creative, critical, and systems thinking capacities of students to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” stated CBSE in an official notice.
In a related development, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) announced the availability of new textbooks aligned with the NCF-SE 2023. The textbooks for Class 3 will be available by April 2024, and those for Class 6 by mid-May 2024. Additionally, NCERT disclosed that 1.21 crore copies of the 2023-2024 editions for various classes have already been distributed, with more on the way. To further support accessibility, digital copies of all NCERT textbooks are freely available on the NCERT portal, DIKSHA, and the ePathshala portal and app.
