The petitioners and students are hoping that if the physical board exams cannot be changed into internal assessment completely, the boards should at least change it to objective questions, rather than having complete subjective questions-based exam.
The Supreme Court, on Monday, has agreed to list the plea seeking cancellation of offline board exams for classes 10 and 12, which have been scheduled to take place in the next few months by CBSE, ICSE, NIOS, and several other such education boards in states this year.
This plea was mentioned before Chief Justice of India (CJI) NV Ramana by advocate Prashant Padmanabhan. It will will now be listed before a bench led by Justice AM Khanwilka. “This is regarding class 10 and 12 Board examinations. Physical examination should not be held due to the pandemic,” lawyer Prashant Padmanabhan said. “Let the matter go before a bench of Justice A M Khanwilkar,” the bench said.
The plea has been filed by Anubha Shrivastava Sahai, an advocate and child rights activist, along with the Student Union of Odisha-NYCS as the second petitioner. Thousands of students came together to sign Google forms regarding their protest, and the petitioners randomly selected two students from each state from those records, talked to them over the phone and then added their names to the plea.
“Our main priority is getting rid of physical board exams completely this year. We want the Supreme Court to instruct the boards to conduct internal assessments for students,” Anubha Shrivastava Sahai told Indianexpress.com. She says that the motive behind this is to make sure that students do not have to take any additional mental stress, as they have already “suffered mentally, physically and financially during the last two years due to Covid-19”.
A class 12 student agreed with the petitioners. “It has been a rollercoaster ride, and that too a bad one. Board exams are already so stressful for us, and this suspense over the results and form of exam is simply making it worse for us,” the Class 12 student from Delhi, who did not want to be named, told https://myncertguide2020.blogspot.com/
The petitioners and students are hoping that if the physical board exams cannot be changed into internal assessment completely, the boards should at least change it to objective questions, rather than having complete subjective questions-based exam. For the past term and a few other exams, the question papers have majorly been MCQ/objective based. So, students have lost the practise and habit of writing, Shrivastava Sahai claimed. Now that the term I board exams (and some of the other exams too) are being conducted in offline mode with subjective questions, the petitioners and students feel it is unfair and will add to their mental pressure.
“I have now been writing down all my notes, rather than typing them out because I had completely lost the habit of writing in the past few years. Now, more than revising for my board exams, I am instead doing writing practice. So it is unfair to us, and sounds very silly to me. CBSE needs to sort out its priority rather than sticking up to old thought process,” another Class 12 student from Chandigarh told Indianexpress.com.
Through this plea, Shrivastava Sahai is also urging CBSE and all other boards to concentrate on declaring results without any delay. “If CBSE and other boards keep delaying results this way, it can cause huge problems for students as they can end up missing university deadlines, or their admissions for higher studies can get delayed, leading to further delay in the other future admissions too,” she said.
She also added that as far as she understands, for the term-1 board result CBSE will now wait till this matter is cleared up in the Supreme Court.