Setting papers will no longer test teachers

Updated on: Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is continuing to take major strides in modernizing various aspects of education in affiliated schools.

The central board has now decided to automate the process of generation and delivery of question papers for Std IX and Std X.

A new software will generate question papers for the summative assessments (SA), which are conducted twice a year. The SA is the written exam conducted by CBSE under its Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) process.

The software will be prepared by an IT company chosen after a competitive bidding process. A huge question bank will be created by the board and fed into the templates in the software. The question paper for each subject will be set according to various parameters.

The questions could be textual, pictorial or in multiple choice formats and the software is expected to incorporate all the requirements accordingly. It is estimated that thousands of questions will be needed in the template, thus enabling the software to offer variety. Every year more questions will be added to the bank.

CBSE spokesperson Rama Sharma said, "Use of technology is need of the hour. CBSE's jurisdiction is now across the globe and we need to have infrastructure commensurate with our scope of work. Lot of man-hours will be saved by automating the question paper generation process and also prepare us for bigger changes ahead."

The software company will be asked to prepare the blueprint and CBSE will enter questions into the format. The software will then choose questions based on difficulty parameters, syllabus and other criteria.

For the schools, the process will be very simple. The principal, or any other designated school staff, will have to log in to an online portal.

After verification of credentials, the school will have to select the subject and standard for which it wants the question paper generated.

Then, at the click of a button, a question paper will be generated on screen which will be unlike the paper at any other school in the country, for that particular day at least. Schools can then print the question paper and distribute it in the exam halls.

George Thadathil, principal of KV Vayusena Nagar, said, "This is a welcome change as it will help quicken the entire process. For us, the question papers were coming from CBSE but the process was lengthy. First CBSE sends papers to KV Sangathana, and then they distribute to the schools. Now, as a principal I can take a printout sitting at my office, thus saving a lot on costs and manpower."

The process also gives a boost to the security angle, since questions papers can be generated and printed just hours before the exam. The IT company making the software has been asked to keep adequate hardware backup for almost 8,000 schools to simultaneously generate and download question papers.

Times of India

Setting papers will no longer test teachers

More Education news