Calcutta schools await clarity on pre-board exams - board exams for Classes X and XII will be pen-and-paper and there has to be 2 months of classes before the boards

Several school heads said that they would prefer to have the rehearsals in school if they get the go-ahead from the state government and parents agree to send their children to school

St James’ School, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Our Lady Queen of the Missions School Salt Lake and The Future Foundation School are some of the schools that are yet to announce the pre-board dates. Loreto House, The Heritage School and Sri Sri Academy have sent out dates but said they are not “watertight but flexible” and subject to change, depending upon the situation.: File picture

Jhinuk Mazumdar   |   TT   |   Calcutta   |   20.12.20  : Several schools are either waiting for further clarity before announcing the dates of their pre-board exams or reconsidering the dates if they had already been announced in the light of the announcement by the ICSE council that the board exams for Classes X and XII will be pen-and-paper and there has to be two months of classes on the campus before the boards. 

Several school heads said that they would prefer to have the rehearsals in school if they get the go-ahead from the state government and parents agree to send their children to school. 

They agreed that if the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has said that the boards will be in the pen-and-paper format, the rehearsals should be conducted the same way. 

“For the entire academic year, the students have not had one full-length exam. 

Before the pre-boards, they usually have two. The pre-boards ideally should be a practice before the finals,” said the head of an ICSE school. 

St James’ School, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Our Lady Queen of the Missions School Salt Lake and The Future Foundation School are some of the schools that are yet to announce the pre-board dates. Loreto House, The Heritage School and Sri Sri Academy have sent out dates but said they are not “watertight but flexible” and subject to change, depending upon the situation. 

“We are waiting for an indication from the council regarding the board timetable and only then will we announce the pre board dates. We don’t want to schedule the pre-boards long before the boards. Students get into a rhythm of studying and writing and a long gap between the boards and pre-boards will spoil that,” said Terence Ireland, principal of St James’ School. 

Ireland said that ideally the pre-boards should be in the pen-and-paper mode if the boards are to be so and for that they would have to be allowed by the state government to resume classes on the campus.

In many schools, the exams have been unit tests or of a shorter duration of 40 to 50 marks spanning for about an hour.

“The idea of pre-boards is to simulate a board exam. How can a unit test be a rehearsal?” asked Ranjan Mitter, principal of The Future Foundation School.

He said they are waiting for clarity from the council and state government before giving out any dates. 

“We have not announced the dates yet and if we know parents are willing (after the state government’s permission), we can conduct it in pen-and-paper and try to give students the experience of writing long answers,” said Sister Sherly Sebastian, principal, Our Lady Queen of the Missions School Salt Lake. 

Loreto House has communicated tentative dates to the students of Classes X and XII, which could be January end and beginning of February.

“We have told parents these are tentative dates. We will reconsider and change the dates if schools are allowed to resume on campus classes because we will prefer to have offline rehearsal exams,” said Aruna Gomes, principal of Loreto House. 

The campuses are closed since March and schools have been conducting online classes and also online exams. 

The last time that the board examinees across many schools wrote a full-length two-hour or three-hour paper was only in February in the last academic year. 

Teachers said that students might have lost touch with the practice of writing out long answers and sitting at a stretch for two or three hours without a break. 

Schools will try to make use of the two months of on-campus classes to conduct the pre-boards to give students a shot at writing out the papers before the finals.

“The Class X students have had no experience of an offline exam. It would be beneficial to both the board classes to write a mock exam on pen-and-paper format,” said Seema Sapru, principal of The Heritage School. 

“We might consider postponing the dates further depending on the government directive,” she added.

At Sri Sri Academy, too, the pre-boards dates are “not watertight”.

“We will not have the rehearsals earlier than January end but even that is flexible depending on the situation. We will wait for the state government to tell us when it is safe to resume on campus classes and make use of the two months to have the pre-boards,” said Suvina Shunglu, principal of Sri Sri Academy.

St Xavier's Collegiate School will have a meeting with teachers and parents of Classes X and XII in January, before taking any decision about pre boards, said prin-cipal Father M. Thamacin Arulappan.