CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu school education department is planning to introduce board exams for Class XI. The suggestion, which has been on since the introduction of National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), was taken up for discussion during an 11-hour meeting chaired by School Education Minister KA Sengottaiyan on Monday. This apparently will help students get their basics right and would also help in competitive examinations like NEET — 40 per cent content of which is from Class XI.
Teacher associations and school headmasters in the meeting stressed the need to revamp the higher secondary syllabus and examination pattern. The syllabus was last revised in 2004. The State government drew flak for not revising the syllabus once in every seven years as per norm.
The government had first constituted an expert committee headed by retired Anna University professor N Rao. The subject-wise draft report prepared by this panel was revised based on National Council for Educational Research & Training (NCERT) content.
Former school education minister K Pandiarajan had announced in January that the process was nearing completion and new textbooks might be released by year end. Along with textbooks the department is now mulling introduction of common examination for Class XI. “Everyone in the meeting supported this proposal, as many schools in the State skip some of the portions in Class XI syllabus and start classes for Class XII,” Samy Sathiamoorthy, president of Tamil Nadu high and higher secondary school headmasters association, told Express after the meeting.
Educationist Narayanan Natarajan said that this was one of the four major recommendations by former IIT Kanpur chairman M Anandakrishnan in his 2006 report based on which entrance test was scrapped in Tamil Nadu.