Board Exams 2022: The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a petition seeking cancellation of offline board exams for classes 10 and 12 held by CBSE, ICSE, NIOS, and other education boards in states this year.
Prashant Padmanabhan presented this case before Chief Justice of India (CJI) NV Ramana. The case will now be heard by a bench led by Justice AM Khanwilka. “This is regarding class 10 and 12 Board examinations. Physical examination should not be held due to the pandemic,” lawyer Prashant Padmanabhan said. “Let the matter go before a bench of Justice A M Khanwilkar,” the bench said.
Anubha Shrivastava Sahai, an advocate and child rights activist, filed the lawsuit, along with the Student Union of Odisha-NYCS. The petitioners randomly selected two students from each state from these records, spoke with them over the phone, and then added their names to the petition. Thousands of students signed Google forms regarding their protest.
“Our main priority is getting rid of physical board exams completely this year. We want the Supreme Court to instruct the boards to conduct internal assessments for students,” Anubha Shrivastava Sahai told Indianexpress.com. She says that the motive behind this is to make sure that students do not have to take any additional mental stress, as they have already “suffered mentally, physically and financially during the last two years due to Covid-19”.
A class 12 student agreed with the petitioners. “It has been a rollercoaster ride, and that too a bad one. Board exams are already so stressful for us, and this suspense over the results and form of exam is simply making it worse for us,” the Class 12 student from Delhi, who did not want to be named, told Indianexpress.com.
It is hoped that if the physical board exams cannot be completely changed into internal assessments, at least the boards should at least change them to objective questions rather than having completely subjective questions. The question papers for the past term and a few other exams have heavily been MCQ/objective based. According to Shrivastava Sahai, students have lost the practice and habit of writing. As the term I board exams (and some other exams too) are now being conducted in offline mode with subjective questions, petitioners and students feel it is unfair and will put more pressure on the students.
“I have now been writing down all my notes, rather than typing them out because I had completely lost the habit of writing in the past few years. Now, more than revising for my board exams, I am instead doing writing practice. So it is unfair to us, and sounds very silly to me. CBSE needs to sort out its priority rather than sticking up to old thought process,” another Class 12 student from Chandigarh told Indianexpress.com.
Shrivastava Sahai is also urging CBSE and all other boards to declare their results as soon as possible through this plea. “If CBSE and other boards keep delaying results this way, it can cause huge problems for students as they can end up missing university deadlines, or their admissions for higher studies can get delayed, leading to further delay in the other future admissions too,” she said.
