AFFILIATION NORMS OF CBSE REVAMPED

NEW DELHI: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has revamped the norms of affiliation for schools, taking the entire affiliation process online to increase transparency, and made it more focused on learning outcomes, in a move that should serve as a confidence boost for the parents of schoolchildren. Schools will also have to make mandatory fee disclosures and ensure there are no hidden costs for parents to pay, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar said.

ALLAHABAD: To ensure that there is no cheating in the 2019 high school and intermediate examinations, the UP Board has now made installation of digital voice recorders mandatory in every examination hall of all government-aided and self-financed schools.

With this move, the UP Board, considered one of the largest examination bodies in the world, has earned the distinction of being the only such body in the country to make CCTV cameras with DVRs mandatory to curb the use of unfair means.

UP Board secretary Neena Srivastava said that the decision to equip the existing CCTV cameras in schools with DVRs came after instances of invigilators and other staff reciting solved answers from a corner of the examination hall (which was out of the CCTV’s range) were reported in the 2018 exams.

Mass copying has been a challenge for both the state government as well as UP Board for the last several years. After Yogi Adityanath took charge, he supervised the 2018 UP Board exam preparations by video-conferencing meetings.