Creative Answers Will Fetch More Marks In Board Exams: CBSE

New Delhi: Rote learning may not fetch good marks anymore in the CBSE board examination. For, the Board has decided to reward students in the upcoming exams who have answered creatively and have adopted an innovative approach in doing so.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has already trained the evaluators to award marks based on meaningful learning. While awarding marks, the evaluators will also examine if a student has followed the different sources of learning as well apart from what has been taught in the classroom.

“A large number of evaluators have already been trained, and we are in the process of training the rest of the trainers on allowing creative ways of answering a question. They have been told to not deduct marks if a student is moving away from a conventional method of answering,” CBSE secretary Anurag Tripathi told news portal The Print.

The CBSE board examinations this year began from 15 February for vocational subjects, and 2 March for the main subjects. Around 18 lakh students have registered themselves for the Class 10 examination, and more than 12 lakh for the Class 12 examination.

But what is ‘creativity’? The board says it is completely subjective, and it wants that subjectivity to prevail.

“We understand that creativity is completely subjective and one evaluator’s view will differ from another. But this is what we want… We don’t want students to cram things and produce them as is on the answer sheet,” Tripathi said.

The officers, however, did agree that the scope of being creative with answers will be greater in humanities subjects rather than the sciences.

The board has also decided that one-third of all questions will now offer students a choice. Earlier, this ‘internal choice’ only used to be offered with a handful of long answer-type questions.

The number of objective-type questions is also being increased from the current 10 per cent to 25 per cent.