The ISC (Class XII) exams started on Thursday with environmental science.
A handful of students appeared for the paper as only a few schools offer the subject.
On Friday, over 1 lakh students in the country and about 28,000 in Bengal will appear for English Paper 1 (English language), which is a compulsory paper.
Except for the art papers, each day’s ISC test starts at 2pm.
Students have to be seated in the examination hall half an hour before the start of the test. They are provided a reading time of 15 minutes.
“We have boosted the confidence of our students and told them that they have prepared so long and now is the time to present what they know,” said Father Roshan Tirkey, principal, St Xavier’s Collegiate School.
“After the Covid pandemic, we have seen students getting nervous faster than they would before, so we told them not to rush through the question paper. Even if a question seems unknown to them, they should think and attempt to answer it,” he said.
The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), which conducts the ICSE (Class X) and ISC (Class XII) exams, had in August announced that it would give around 25 per cent weightage to “higher-order thinking questions” from the 2025 examination year.
These questions target the domains of “application, analysis, evaluation and creativity”, the council said.
The percentage of such questions has been increasing every year with a shift
away from rote learning so a student’s understanding of the subjects is better
tested.
The ISC exams will end on April 5. The ICSE exams start on February 18.
