Students taking provisional admission to Class XI under CBSE and ISC curricula will face less risk of being disqualified from a stream or subject combination if they end up doing badly in their board examinations.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Council of Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) schools, following the practice of granting admission to students of Class XI before results of the Class X board exams are announced, will be more “cautious” this year before allowing them to choose their subjects and streams.

The move comes in the wake of instructions from the CBSE and the ICSE asking their affiliated schools to discourage the practice of forcing students to change their streams once they take admission.

The boards have received complaints that students suffer from stress following a forced change of stream.

“We have structured our admission criteria and screening procedure in such a way that a student will not be required to change a stream and subject combination,” said Malini Bhagat, the principal of Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School, a CBSE institution.

The process of Class XI admissions has already started in many schools. Once students get admission to Class XI with a particular combination of subjects, they buy textbooks and attend classes.

Parents are compelled to bear the additional burden of buying a second set of books for the newly-allotted subjects if there is a change of stream.

More importantly, a change of subjects is known to demoralise students, causing mental and emotional stress.

But in keeping with CBSE instructions, Mahadevi Birla and other schools under the board will allow a change of subject if a student so requests.

“At times, students find it difficult to cope with a particular subject. In such cases, we cannot be rigid and the students will be granted permission to change the subject,” said the principal of a CBSE school in north Calcutta.

The schools affiliated to the CISCE, too, are allowed to provisionally admit Class XI students before the announcement of Class X (ICSE) exam results. Schools can also allow students to choose the subjects and stream in accordance with their performance in selection and unit tests, said Gerry Arathoon, the additional secretary and officiating chief executive of the CISCE.