After receiving recommendation, the board has in turn decided to implement a new system of assessment. Representational ImageExpress photo by Jaipal SinghAfter several websites and newspapers reported that the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has allegedly decided to drop five social science chapters, the board has issued a statement rejecting claims. CBSE clarified no chapters have been deleted from the syllabus of social science class 10 by the Board. All the chapters will be studied by the class 10 students in “due course of time and also evaluated.”
In a press release, CBSE has stated, “The decision of the board to make few chapters as part of internal assessment is based on the sound rationale in view of the feedback from stakeholders and recommendations of the Committee of Courses of Social Science.”
The alleged dropped chapters, including three on political studies and two on the environment, will only be part of internal assessment, but not the final board exam, stated CBSE.
CBSE said they have been receiving “numerous requests” from its stakeholders to “rationalise the curriculum of Social Science” as students were forced to study the huge syllabus of four different disciplines eg. History, Geography, Political Science and Economics.
After receiving the recommendation, the board has decided to implement a new system of assessment. “The Committee of Courses of Social Science recommended assessing these chapters under the new system of strengthened school-based assessment in consonance with the overall spirit of the board’s circular of 6th March 2019 which focuses on how CBSE intends to strengthen its evaluation process including the school based/internal assessment, in order to augment the skill set being acquired by the students,” CBSE said in the press note.
The mentioned chapters namely, Democracy and Diversity, Popular Struggle and Movements and Challenges to Democracy can best be understood through project work and experiential learning and similarly best assessed through different modes in addition to pen paper tests, in any of the following forms or combination of different forms for periodic tests:
Last month, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has dropped three chapters from its Class 9 history textbook, including one that illustrates caste conflict through the struggles of the so-called ‘lower caste’ Nadar women of Travancore, who were forced to keep their upper bodies uncovered.
