The School Education Department's move to bring question bank came against the backdrop of the poor score of the State in the learning outcome and quality domain as per the report published of Performance Grading Index (PGI) index in 2021.

"Despite being among the top three States in school education Tamil Nadu performance in the PGI index poses a significant challenge towards the objectives of improving the overall education system", he said adding that similar to this, according to the ASER Phase I report, one in four children in Class 8 in Tamil Nadu was not able to read class II level text, and only 50% of students studying in Class 8 were able to grasp division.

Explaining the new proposal, which is expected to benefit about 1.2 crore students both in government and private schools, the official said the assessment questions will be provided in both English and Tamil. "The questions provided would align with the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) Tamil Nadu state syllabus taxonomy," he added.

The official also made it clear that the prepared question bank will be evaluated by the technical committee to ensure that they are not oriented towards training high school students for competitive examinations.

Stating that the question structuring would be easy, medium, and hard in concept, he said, "For Class 6, there would be more than 500 questions in all the subjects, for Class 7 the question bank would contain more than 800 questions and for Class 8 more than 600 questions will be there".

However, the official said for students studying in Class 9 and Class 10, there would be more than 1,000 questions for each standard in all the subjects. "For Classes 11 and 12, there would be about 7,000 questions each for Science and Commerce students," he said.

Pointing out that for each question provided, the answers would include how the solution was arrived at, he said numerical answer-based questions, stepwise arrival at the answer would be provided while for non-numerical questions, explanatory paragraphs with images would be provided.

He said the question bank will also be digitised in the proposed high-tech labs especially in the government schools where the students could access the questions through desktop computers. "The question bank will also be uploaded in the students' free laptops given by the government," he added.