Board exams to be held twice a year: NCF

New Education policy framework...

The Education Ministry announced that final exams will be held twice a year to give students both "time and opportunity," therefore the two-board exam system is about to return. It stated that they could take it whenever they were ready.

According to NCERT, this would be made feasible by developing a "comprehensive test item bank" that can be utilized to design tests using the appropriate software, according to the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for School Education, 2023.

This will make it possible to transition in the near future to the system of on-demand exams envisioned in the NEP, it was further said.

On the current system of boards, NCF says that with one exam in a year, students do not have the chance to take it when they are ready, or a second chance to clear it if they miss the first opportunity.

About current challenges of board exams, the NCF states that it only focus on the “capacity of students to reproduce learnt facts” which is not what exams are meant for.

A fairly limited set of competencies are evaluated because the majority of exams only measure rote memory. This presents an inaccurate or partial image of student learning, at the very least, according to the NCF.

Instead, it continued, board exams should evaluate students' mastery of curriculum-required competencies and give a "valid and reliable picture of student performance."

According to the NCF, the board will be in charge of creating and putting into place a fair and trustworthy testing methodology and techniques to evaluate competencies.

The framework also requires that students in classes 11 and 12 study two languages, one of which must be an Indian language.

In order to give students more flexibility, the choice of subjects for classes 11 and 12 will not be limited to streams like arts, science, and commerce.