BHUBANESWAR: Students will be evaluated in three different ways for matric or high school certificate (HSC) examination this year. Marks and grades will be awarded on the basis of the best of three outcomes. Chief secretary Suresh Chandra Mohapatra announced this here on Friday.

He said the Board of Secondary Education (BSE), the government agency which holds the matric examination and publishes its results, had conducted a meeting with stakeholders like teachers, students, parents and educationists on the issue of holding examination and publication of its result.

According to the findings of the meeting reported by the BSE, Summative Assessment-II (SA-II) examination will be conducted for the matric students via offline mode from April 29 to May 6 to evaluate performance of the students during the second half of the course period.
Summative Assessment-I (SA-I) was conducted for four days starting from January 5 this year. Besides, internal assessment tests have been conducted during the course period.

The BSE finally suggested that matric students will be evaluated in three different ways. According to the first method, weightage of SA-I along with internal assessment will be doubled for the results. In the second method, weightage of SA-II will be doubled to get the results.

Third method is an alternative assessment. It will be done by taking 30 percent of SA-I, 20 percent of internal assessment and 50 percent of SA-II. Marks and grades will be awarded on the basis of the best of three outcomes subject-wise.

If a student has 57 in mathematics in the first method, 52 in second method and 54 in third method of assessment, he.she will get the highest marks according to the first method. “After taking the highest marks subject-wise, a final tabulation will be made to get the final result of the student,” said official sources.

The chief secretary said this decision has been taken keeping the Covid condition in mind and to reduce pressure of examination from the minds of students. It is compulsory for the students to appear the SA-II examination via offline mode in their own schools. Teachers from other schools will be engaged to manage the examination. If it is not possible to hold examinations in a school, its students will appear for matric examination in nearby schools. BSE will issue a guideline on this soon, he added.

He said the examination will start at 8am keeping the summer season in mind. There will be one subject per day. Board should try to complete the examination as soon as possible without providing much of a gap between two examinations, he added.

Last year, the board had published matric results by adopting an alternative method of assessment. No examination was conducted for matric students due to the increasing number of Covid-19 cases last time.