“Despite being among the top three states in school education, Tamil Nadu’s performance in the PGI poses a significant challenge towards the objectives of improving the overall education system. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Phase I, one in four Class 8 student in the State was unable to read Class 2 level text. Only 50 per cent of Class 8 students were able to grasp division,” an official said.

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 would be provided in both English and Tamil. “The questions would align with the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) syllabus,” he added.

The question bank would be evaluated by a technical committee to ensure that they were not oriented towards training high school students for competitive examinations, he said.

The questions would be structured as easy, medium and hard in concept, he said, adding that there would be more than 500 questions covering all subjects for Class 6. more than 800 questions for Class 7 and 600 for Class 8. For Classes 9 and 10, the number of questions would be over 1,000 each. In the case of Classes 11 and 12, there would be 7,000 questions each for science and commerce students, he said.

The official added that answers to all the questions would also be provided. While solutions with steps would be available for problems, explanatory paragraphs and photographs would be given for others, he said.

He said the question bank would also be digitised and given access to students through computers at schools. “The question bank will also be uploaded to the free laptops given to the students by the government,” he added.