The School Education Department will be conducting Plus Two practical exams at 195 centres across the educational districts of Tiruchi, Musiri, Lalgudi and Manapparai in two phases later this month.
On Monday, Chief Educational Officer R. Arivazhagan convened a meeting of school heads and handed over sealed bundles of question papers for the practical exams.
The first phase of exams will be from April 16 to 20 and the second phase from April 20 to 23. The sealed bundles will be opened on the day of exam by the invigilators, Chief Educational Officer R. Arivazhagan said.
Students from 257 higher secondary schools - government, government-aided and self-financed - will take up the exam at the 195 centres in compliance with COVID safety protocols.
The practical exams will be conducted batch-wise covering 25 students at a time. The marks of the students will be uploaded online on April 24, Mr. Arivazhagan said.
Only Plus Two students are being permitted to come to schools and the department has been keeping a constant watch to rule out presence of students of other levels in the schools.
“A month back, the department acted on specific complaints and conducted surprise checks in a couple of schools. Other than Plus Two students, the rest of them in other levels were sent home,” the CEO said.
Since then, private schools have been finding it tough to conduct offline classes for other levels on the sly as there are informers from within, due to the competition amongst institutions in geographical clusters, the CEO said.
As for CBSE schools, students of levels X and XII are being permitted to attend offline classes till the completion of practical exams which got off to a start on March 1.
The CBSE has permitted schools to conduct the practical exam / project/ internal assessments till June 11, by themselves for regular students without the need for any external examiner. The CBSE has allowed schools to conduct the practical exam in three shifts.
The theory exam for Plus Two set to begin on May 4 gets to a close on June 14. As per the time table, the public exam for class X CBSE students will begin on May 4 and end on June 7.
