Mita Mukherjee

The Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) will divide the academic session of 2021-22  for classes X and XII into two semesters and the council will conduct exams at the end of each semester, the CISCE said on Friday.

Each semester will cover half the syllabus and students will be tested on 50 percent of the syllabus in each semester, the council said in the circular issued to the schools today.

The first semester exam will be a multiple choice question (MCQ) based test and will be held online in November 2021. While the second semester test will be held in March/April 2022 and will be conducted either on online or offline depending upon the pandemic situation. In addition to the semester exams, students will be also assessed on practical and project work at the ISC level. Similarly at the ICSE level, students will be assessed on internal assessment.

Gerry Arathoon, secretary and chief executive of CISCE said “Schools now assess the students in their own way, the council has decided to introduce the semester system in order to establish parity and uniformity in the evaluation process. Under the new system, the question papers for both the semesters will be set by the council. The first semester will be MCQ based. So examiners will not be required to correct the papers. The answer scripts of the second semester examinations will be examined by external examiners as it is done in board exams,” Arathoon told EducationWorld.

According to the circular, the weightage of marks for each of the semesters to be finally used for the computation of the board results will be brought down to half.

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