Kerala - Kochi   

New format takes them off guard

Kochi: It was not easy, as expected - was how the majority of Class X students in the city termed day one of the CBSE examination.

For the first time, 20 per cent of the questions were based on higher order thinking skills.

The social studies examination held on Monday gave students a feel of the new pattern.

“The questions were not direct. It took us a lot of time to understand questions asked in the new format,” was how a student of Kendriya Vidyalaya at Kadavanthra referred to the ‘higher order thinking skills’ pattern.

Quoting an example, the student said that a question on Britain’s unification was asked, as “how was the formation of the nation State the result of a long drawn out process in Britain”?

The students also found it difficult to understand the question which said: When did the first clear cut expression of nationalism came in France?

The students said that the second and third sets of question papers were tough compared to the first. They said that the model question papers were easy.

A section of the students said that the board should have taken care not to confuse them, as they were the first batch to write the examination that tested their higher order thinking skills.

A student of Chinmaya Vidyalaya said that the 15-minute ‘cooling-off’ time was not enough to read and understand the questions.

Explaining that the CBSE authorities should have announced the new pattern well in advance, teachers in the city schools said that many students were startled by the new design.

They said that the aim of the new pattern was to measure the student’s abilities to reason, justify, analyse, process and evaluate information in subjects such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, political science, history and economics for Class XII, and languages, social science, mathematics and science for Class X.

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