The Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) Class 12 exams have been scrapped for this year due to COVID-19. The decision was taken at a high-level meeting with Union ministers and education officials and chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The CBSE spokesperson Rama Sharma confirmed that the evaluation criteria will not be announced tonight. Students who were set to write the Class 12 board exams will now be evaluated based on “well-defined objective criteria in a time-bound manner”.
In a statement issued after the meeting, PM Modi said that he has “directed officials to ensure that the results are prepared in accordance with well-defined criteria, in a fair and time-bound manner”. The statement also says that like in 2020, students dissatisfied with the marks they get based on this new scheme will have the option to write the exams later when “the situation becomes conducive”. The CBSE has been instructed to provide that option.
The COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted the CBSE Class 12 exams last year as well but by the time CBSE postponed the exams for the first time on March 19, 2020, the board had already conducted exams in several major subjects. The CBSE devised an alternative assessment scheme in which students were marked in papers that got cancelled on the basis of the exams they were able to write.
This year, the situation is different as no exams have been written and even CBSE practical exams, where they were being held, were cut short. The PTI reported on Sunday that the possibility of cancelling the exams was being considered already. In Supreme Court, where a public interest litigation (PIL) case had been filed against the CBSE exams, the Centre had sought two more days -- that is, until Thursday -- to decide. The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has sought internal assessment scores from Classes 11 and 12 for the batch in question from schools. The ISC exams, too, stand cancelled and no new criteria have been declared yet.
