Jamshedpur : The decision of Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) to club the three science subjects � physics, chemistry and biology � into one science paper of 100 marks has been welcomed by the education fraternity of the city.
Students and teachers have said that the move will help to ease the pressure on the students.
Thousands of students taking ICSE examination will be appearing for lesser number of subjects with the board planning to merge the three science papers and the history, civics and geography papers as is done in CBSE by 2018.
The revised syllabus is likely to be implemented in 2018. Students who will be promoted to Class IX in 2016 will be the first batch to write their ICSE under the new system.
Rahil Hussian, a student of Beldih Church said that the students have been facing a lot of pressure due to the three different science subjects and step should be taken to make it easier by clubbing it into one.
Welcoming the plans another student said that the move was aimed at reducing the stress on the students and claimed that the shortening of the papers would not affect the standard of the course.
But teachers of several ICSE schools expressed the fear that the move would affect the quality of the course. “It is true that there are some dated topics in the current ICSE syllabus. But that is no reason why the three science papers of 100 marks each have to be combined into a 100-mark one,” a teacher said.
Among other new plans projected by the council was the introduction of Line Ink Character Recognition (LICR), where the examiners will directly use digital pens to key in marks obtained by students in each subject on a tablet. The marks along with aggregate will be recorded in an internal server (cloud).
Another teacher questioned the council’s intention of reducing the load on the students. ” I fail to understand the move despite the fact that the success rate of ICSE is high.
Also, the number of students scoring between 80 and 100 per cent in ICSE is higher than in other boards. These factors should be taken into consideration before finalising the decision,” the teacher said.
Around 25 per cent of the students in ICSE score 90 per cent and above, against 10-15 per cent in CBSE. “Students do not seem overburdened. Why do we need to lessen the load?” the teacher wondered.
Some teachers said there is a wide difference between the ICSE and ISC syllabi, particularly in science, and students who opt for science at the Plus-II level are often inconvenienced because of that.
