CBSE shifts to grades

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has firmed up plans of replacing the marks system in marksheets with grades from the next academic year.

Announcing this at a press meet in Kolkata yesterday, the chairman of CBSE, Ashok Ganguly said, "Certificates for class 10 will carry grades ranging from one to nine which can be interpreted as marks obtained in Class 10 final exams with a multiple of 10."

"The grading will be comprehensive that will cover all aspects to a child's personality along with his grades in studies. Institutions admitting these students should also consider these aspects of a student," the chairman said.

"We are also planning to do away with terminal exams from class I to class VIII and replace them with five to six assessments through out every single year," he added.

The chairman also said that the Board was considering the possibility of scrapping all exams for promotion to a higher class till class VI.

This was because Ganguly believed that the failure of student in a certain class till class VI was not the students fault but the systems.

"Hence a change in the system rather than the student undergoing through the course once again more important," he explained.

The board which also has presence 20 other countries with large Indian population was considering the possibility of opening schools with its affiliation in the UK, USA and Australia.

"The schools there would be targeted for the large NRI population in those countries," he explained.

Meanwhile, the board has also initiated moves for introducing new job oriented subjects like fashion technology, bio-technology, enterpreneurship, and life-skills.

"With GATT and WTo being the order of the day, India has huge opportunity in the textule industry. With this in mind we have introduced a course on fashion technology in collaboration with the National Institute of Fashion Technology," Ganguly said.