HS revamp to stay relevant

Higher Secondary is struggling to stay relevant in the face of an exodus of city schools to the central boards, forcing the authorities to fast-track a syllabus revamp that made little progress under the erstwhile Left Front regime.

“There is a perception that the HS course does not adequately prepare a student for all-India entrance examinations. We are probing every aspect of the course to identify the deficiencies and come up with the necessary changes,” the new president of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education, Muktinath Chatterjee, told Metro.

The gulf between Higher Secondary and the central boards is nowhere more apparent than in the math syllabus. The central boards have introduced a chapter on mathematical reasoning that is not part of Higher Secondary yet, giving their students the edge in competitive exams where math questions specifically test reasoning skills.

Also, both CBSE and ISC lay stress on the calculus component in math, which teachers say prepares students better for the IIT-JEE and other national engineering entrance exams.

In statistics, Higher Secondary students are not taught Bayes’ theorem, which the central boards have introduced.

Several of Calcutta’s private schools have already switched from the state to the central boards — the list includes St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Loreto House and Modern High — and no new English-medium institution has applied for Higher Secondary affiliation over the past five years. The common gripe is “outdated syllabus and lopsided examination and assessment system”.

Schools that remain under the state board are not getting students for Class XI from outside the Madhyamik circle.

“More than 20 per cent of our Class XI students used to be from other boards. But hardly any student who has not studied in a Madhyamik school now applies for a Higher Secondary seat. In fact, many from the Madhyamik system are seeking admission to ICSE schools after Class VIII,” a teacher at South Point said.

South Point runs a parallel CBSE section till Class VII and intends moving away from the Higher Secondary system in phases, sources said.

Higher Secondary isn’t in sync with the Madhyamik course either. The existing syllabus also does not prepare students for the undergraduate courses of Calcutta University, according to teachers.

Chatterjee said some critical deficiencies had been identified for the board to work on. “Students who clear Higher Secondary and opt to study English honours find themselves unprepared for various aspects of the course. Our syllabus, for instance, does not have a chapter on the history of England. Such lack of continuity is not seen in the syllabi followed by the central boards.”

The HS math and science syllabi were to be remodelled by 2010 in accordance with a set of guidelines drawn up by the Union human resource development ministry for all state boards. The idea was to establish uniform syllabi in the two subjects across states so that students got a level playing field in national competitive examinations.

Several state boards have met the deadline, but not Bengal. The previous government had announced months before its exit that the Higher Secondary board would complete the transition in 2013.

“We will try to expedite the process of revising the science and math syllabi and implement the central directive as early as possible,” promised board president Chatterjee in keeping with the new work ethic adopted by the Mamata Banerjee government.