The Andhra Pradesh government has decided to re-introduce the seven-paper pattern for Class 10 students writing their Secondary School Certificate (SSC) Board Examinations in the current academic year (2023-24).
A decision to this effect was conveyed to the representatives of various teacher associations and other stakeholders at a recent meeting attended by Education Minister Botcha Satyanarayana.
As per the decision, the Science question paper will be divided into two — Physical Science (50 marks) and Biological Science (50 marks) with 17 questions in each paper.
The Physical Science and Biological Science examinations will be conducted on two days with a duration of two hours each, says Director of Government Examinations D. Devananda Reddy.
Speaking to The Hindu on August 10 (Thursday), Mr. Devananda Reddy said that discontinuation of First Language Composite Course was yet another decision taken at the meeting.
“The composite first language paper i.e. Telugu / Sanskrit, Urdu / Hindi, Urdu / Arabic and Urdu / Persian will be discontinued from this academic year to create a level-playing filed among all the students in the SSC Public Examinations,” he said.
Sources in the department said the demerger of the two Science wings (Physical Science and Biological Science) was necessitated due to the confusion faced by students while writing the examinations in the previous academic year.
As part of the examination reforms, the government had rolled out a six-paper pattern, doing away with the 11 papers in the past, from the academic year 2022-23, in alignment with its plan to introduce the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus and prepare students for the 2024-25 CBSE public exams.
The 11-paper pattern had been introduced in the academic year 2016-17 under the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) pattern, and a seven-paper pattern was implemented in the exams conducted in 2021 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Physical Science and Biological Science were merged into one paper following a study conducted by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), which said that there was no need to test the students extensively in the public examinations as they were any way writing four formative and two terminal tests through the year.
The SCERT suggested an examination with six or seven papers in view of the government’s plan to affiliate State-run schools with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and prepare the first batch of student to write the Central syllabus exams in 2024-25.
