CCE Equal Weightage
Students across schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will now have to take their first semester as seriously as the second.
From next year, a student's promotion to the next class would depend equally on his performance in term I and term II. In other words, both semesters will carry weightage of 50 per cent each.
The change - which was communicated to all CBSE affiliated schools through a circular dated September 9 - has been prescribed for Class IX and X. Under the current scheme of Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), the academic year is divided into two semesters of six months each.
Semester I (April to September) and Semester II (October to March) carry an unequal weightage of 40 and 60 per cent, respectively, in the calculation of the overall performance.
The CBSE is now keen on removing this discrimination.
"But the change will be effective only from next year, that is academic session 2011-12," CBSE chairperson Vineet Joshi said.
The CCE is the board's new scheme of evaluation which was introduced in October in Class IX across all schools in the country. Under this system, students are not promoted on the basis of a year-end examination but assessed throughout the year through class work, projects, unit tests and even co-curricular activities.
To implement this effectively, the academic year was divided into two terms. Each term is made up of two formative assessments and one summative assessment.
While formative assessments can be done through assignments, quizzes, debates, group discussions and projects, summative assessment is a written examination which evaluates a student's performance at the end of each term.
"The CCE scheme is very young and it will evolve into its most effective form over the years.
When it was introduced last year, term I and II had unequal weightage because some schools said that they had more number of working days in the latter half of the year," said Usha Ram, principal, Laxman Public School, who has been closely associated with the CBSE in formulating the CCE scheme.
"But we realised that if the syllabus has been bifurcated equally between term I and II, then why should one's performance in term I be less important. Hence the change was announced this year," said Lata Vaidyanathan, principal, Modern School, Barakhamba, who is a member of the board's CCE committee.
According to Ram, the board was keen to implement the change this year itself, but couldn't. "The letters for this year had gone out to the schools already and we did not want to introduce any change in the middle of the academic session," she said.
IndiaToday
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