The ICSE examinations began on a happy note on Monday, with both students and teachers giving thumbs up to this year's smart answer booklets with photo IDs that helped examinees save time by doing away with the tedious name-roll number drill.
More than 12,000 boys and girls from across Jharkhand appeared for their English language paper on Day One, among them 5,000 from the 20-odd ICSE schools in Ranchi and 4,175 from 43 cradles in Jamshedpur.
The two-hour exam began at 11am at home centres. The next paper is English literature and is slated for March 2.
Vaishnavi Jain of St Thomas School, Ranchi, was beaming with excitement after the exam got over at 1pm. "We didn't have to waste time writing our names, subject code, roll number and date.
Instead, the answer sheets had a unique identification number. It was so cool!" said the teenager.
Ritika Joshi at Bishop Westcott Girls' School in Namkum echoed Vaishnavi. "We received separate answer sheets along with our photographs on them and the paper was quite easy too," she said.
"The language paper was cakewalk," said Ayushi Kumari of ADLS Sunshine School in Jamshedpur. Added Medha Panda of Sacred Heart Convent School, also in the steel city, "I wish all the other papers are as easy."
If students are happy with the changes made by the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, teachers are glad that evaluation has been made foolproof as well.
Principal of Bishop Westcott Girls' School Jacqueline Edwin said they had 18 evaluators in all for various subjects. "Live ink character recognition (LICR) has been introduced by the council. This digital pen and tablet-based technology will help us save time too," she said.
The LICR solution consists of a digital pen, a tablet and special printed paper used as the top sheet on answer booklets. The digital pen is used by an examiner to write marks on the top sheet. The pen digitises marks in real time and transfers data to the tablet via Bluetooth. The allotted marks is displayed on the tablet in handwritten form as well as digitised format. Once the user validates marks on the tablet, the data is encrypted and transferred to the centralised server of the education board.
Principal of St Xavier's School Father Ajit Xess said they were hopeful of publishing the results early this year, "thanks to the new evaluation system introduced by the council".
Puneeta B. Chouhan, principal of Hill Top School and the convener of ICSE schools in Zone B, said the English language paper was balanced. "Students answered in new answer booklets, which had photo IDs and the usual 16 pages."
The ICSE exams are scheduled to end on March 31 with art paper IV.
Class X and XII CBSE exams will begin from Tuesday.
