ISC exams to begin on Nov 22, ICSE on Nov 29; will be offline

ISC exams to begin on Nov 22, ICSE on Nov 29; will be offline

Jhimli.Mukherjeepandey@timesgroup.com

Kolkata:23.10.2021

The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations late on Friday announced fresh dates for the ISC and ICSE first semester exams. ISC exams will begin on November 22 and end on December 20, while ICSE will be held from November 29 to December 16.

A circular, signed by council chief executive and secretary Gerry Arathoon, was sent to school heads with the new schedule. It also stated that the exams would be conducted in offline mode at the candidates’ respective schools.

The ISC exam will be oneand-a-half hours long. Most ICSE papers will be an hour long, though some like Hindi and mathematics will be for an hour and a half. ISC exams will start at 2pm while ICSE will start at 11am. This has been done to sanitise the school premises between the two exams, school heads said.

While ISC will start with the English literature paper on November 22, ICSE will start with the English language paper on November 29. The circular also said that in addition to the scheduled time for each exam, an additional 10 minutes will be given to read the paper. The question paper-cum-answer booklet will be given 10 minutes ahead of the scheduled start time.

Earlier, the council had planned to hold online exams for the first semester from November 15 for both ISC and ICSE.

School heads happy with move

On October 22, the council had sent a circular postponing the exam for “reasons beyond (their) control”. Friday’s circular clarified that the council had received a large number of mails from school heads, students and parents saying that non-availability of devices, irregular power supply and network and bandwidth problems would make it difficult to take the test online. Hence, the decision was made to switch over to offline mode.

School heads sounded happy with the move. “At least this gives an even platform for all children to write the test,” said Rupkatha Sarkar, principal of La Martiniere for Girls.

“When the exams were postponed, students were highly disappointed. We, too, had done a lot of preparation for the online test and were a bit bewildered, but we knew that the council was working out something better,” said John Bagul, South City International School principal.

“We will now wait for the council to hold a meeting and give us the details of the modalities of the offline exam,” said Richard Gasper, principal of St Augustine’s Day School, Kolkata.

School heads wondered whether the question paper-cum-answer booklet would contain OMR sheets that would be automatically corrected and make declaration of results faster. Some felt that there were chances of normal sheets where students would have to tick right answers.