Forget cramming, CBSE will reward students for creative answers from this year

CBSE officials say students can have different sources of learning apart from the classroom, and they are allowed to use them in their answers if they want.

Students writing board exams | Representational Image | PTI

New Delhi: Students who answer questions creatively will be rewarded in Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) exams from this year.

In a bid to move away from rote learning and involve more experiential learning and innovative methods, the board has decided to allow creative ways of answering a question. Senior officials from the board say evaluators have been trained for the purpose.

“A large number of evaluators have already been trained, and we are in the process of training the rest of the trainers on allowing creative ways of answering a question. They have been told to not deduct marks if a student is moving away from a conventional method of answering,” said CBSE secretary Anurag Tripathi.

The CBSE board examinations this year begin from 15 February for vocational subjects, and 2 March for the main subjects. Around 18 lakh students have registered themselves for the Class 10 examination, and more than 12 lakh for the Class 12 examination.

What counts as ‘creativity’?

According to CBSE officials, students can have different sources of learning apart from the classroom, and if they want to use them in the answer sheet, they should be allowed.

But what is ‘creativity’? The board says it is completely subjective, and it wants that subjectivity to prevail.

“We understand that creativity is completely subjective and one evaluator’s view will differ from another. But this is what we want… We don’t want students to cram things and produce them as is on the answer sheet,” Tripathi said.

The officers, however, did agree that the scope of being creative with answers will be greater in humanities subjects rather than the sciences.

Increased choice

The board has 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.

The number of objective-type questions is also being increased from the current 10 per cent to 25 per cent.