New Delhi: Practical exams will no longer be confined to science subjects such as Chemistry, Biology and Physics in the CBSE Class 12 board examinations. The Board has decided that from the 2020 examination onwards, even humanities subjects such as History, English and Hindi, among others, will have practical elements.
Senior CBSE officials told ThePrint that from the next academic session, all papers will have both theory and practical elements. The breakdown of marks will remain the same — 80 marks for theory and 20 marks for practicals.
An official circular regarding the decision, however, is yet to be sent to schools.
“We included practicals in the Hindi paper this academic session on a trial basis and were happy with the results,” said a senior official from CBSE. “From the coming year, all subjects will have a compulsory practical and theory element.”
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Field trips and recitals
CBSE has lined up field trips, project work and recitals as part of its practical portion for the humanities subjects. For History, the practical part will include project work, field trips and other similar work. English and Hindi could see recitation, debates and other ways in which a student’s language skills can be tested. In the 2019-20 board exam that concluded recently, CBSE included recitation as a part of practicals for the Hindi exam.
The idea behind including practicals in all subjects is to move away from the rote learning approach that the students have been following so far.
“Making practicals a part of the evaluation will give a different approach to learning and students will be able to move away from just cramming and reproducing on the paper,” the official added.
The Board has taken several other steps to move away from the rote learning approach, including awarding marks for creative answers and increasing the number of objective type questions in this year’s exams.
The number of objective-type questions is also being increased from the current 10 per cent to 25 per cent. The Board had also decided that one-third of all questions will now offer students a choice. Earlier, this ‘internal choice’ only used to be offered with a handful of long answer type questions.
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