The state higher secondary council has asked government and government-aided schools to hold online classes during the extended Puja vacation, though only a few days are left before the holidays are over.
The schools will resume on October 25 and again remain closed on October 26 (Sunday) and October 27 and 28 for Chhath Puja.
The Puja vacation started on September 23.
Class XII students will write their fourth and final semester examinations in March 2026, comprising short and descriptive questions.
The council president said that if the schools do not hold online classes and prepare students, they will find it difficult to write the examinations in about four months.
“The syllabus will remain incomplete. We have drawn an elaborate syllabus under the semesterised system. But the long vacation has come in the way of completing it. So, we have asked schools to conduct online classes,” council president Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya said.
Last year, the council divided the Plus-II course into four semesters: semesters I and II in Class XI and semesters III and IV in Class XII.
Before the Puja break, the council came up with guidelines on the pattern of questions on which students would be tested in the examinations scheduled in March.
The council president stated that if students were not adequately familiar with the question patterns, they could struggle to write the examinations.
A council official said the schools would reopen on October 25, on Saturday, but for a day.
“Then the schools would again remain closed on October 26 and October 27 and 28,” the official said.
The state government announced an early Puja vacation on September 23 following a deluge in Calcutta.
The council president said they received reports that some schools held online classes during the Puja vacation to help students prepare for the examinations.
“We are worried about the schools that did not hold online classes,” Bhattacharya said.
The headmaster of Dum Dum Shree Aurobindo Vidyamandir, Ashim Nanda, said that though they received an advisory from the council about online classes, they did not conduct any classes during the vacation.
“Many teachers and students were travelling during the vacation. We could not establish contact with them,” said Nanda.
“We will hold tutorials once the classes resume on a full scale on October 29,” he added.
A council official said that when the Class XII students wrote the third-semester examinations in September entirely on multiple choice questions, many guardians had complained about students not getting enough time to prepare.
Many even demanded that the duration of the examinations be extended.
Some of the guardians detained the council president, who went to some of the examination centres in Salt Lake on September 8, the first day of the third-semester examinations, to press for their demands.
“We are worried about similar demands during the fourth-semester examinations. The extended Puja vacation has posed a challenge,” the official said.
In May 2024, the council had asked schools to start online for Class XI students as the schools had a longer summer vacation because of the heat and the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.
The council had then said in a notice, while announcing the annual working plan for the 2024-25 session, that Class XI, under the segmented Plus-II courses, would begin from May and classes of semester-I would be started “if necessary in online mode”.