MUMBAI: Students will appear for the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) and Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exams from their respective schools and colleges, the state education board said on Thursday.
The offline exams will see a four-fold rise in centres to 30,000 from over 7,000. HSC exams will be held from March 4-30 and SSC exams will be conducted from March 15-April 4. Students will be seated in their schools and colleges where they will be far more comfortable in writing their papers, said Sharad Gosavi, chairperson, Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education.
Every year, students are allotted exam centres by the board. An exception was made last year when self-centres were allotted, but later the exams got cancelled due to the Covid pandemic.
Details of students appearing for the boards were sought from schools and colleges. Educational institutions that have less than 15 stu-dents will be allotted subcentres, which will be in the vicinity of their respective schools or college.
Self-centres will be a task for colleges where arts, commerce and science students come to write language papers on the same day. Somecolleges have 1,200-15,00 students taking HSC exams.
This year, there will be no external examiners for practicals. School and college teachers will conduct the exams based on 40% of the practical syllabus. HSC practicals will be conducted from February 14-March 3 and SSC February 25-March 3.
Students who miss out on their practical and oral exams due to medical reasons, including Covid-19, will be able to take the out-of-turn exams to be held from March 29 to April 18 for HSC and April 5-22 for SSC. Apart from the 15-30 minute additional time allotted for writing papers this year, students will get 10 minutes to read the question papers. Students need to be at the centres at least an hour-anda-half before the exam.
So far, 15 lakh HSC and 16 lakh SSC students have registered for the board exams. This year, students have been allowed to enrol till a day before the exams. Like previous years, each classroom will have 25 students.
Sporadic protests by students against offline exams were witnessed in some parts of the state, including Dharavi. Gosavi said online exams are not possible logistically and the teaching-learning process till now has prepared students for subjective type questions, more than multiple-choice questions.
