Board examination

In India, board examinations refer to the public examinations that occur at the end of the 9th to 10th grade education (SSC), or at the end of the 11th to 12th grade education (HSC). The scores achieved in these exams are considered very important for getting into universities, professional courses or training programmes, and even possibly in finding employment.

State board examinations are variously referred to as Madhayamik, Secondary State Certificate and Higher Secondary Certificate examinations. They are conducted and managed by each education board of the different states in the country. They do not take place simultaneously due to the differences between syllabi and the examination itself. The examinations are generally held in the months of February and March, and the results are out in May and June.

Students have to apply for the examinations in November stating their personal details, subjects, and current educational status. Admit cards for the prescribed examination hall are received at the notified cell or their respective schools about 20–25 days prior to the commencement of the exam.

Examinations are offered for various fields which include Science, Maths, Social Studies, regional and foreign languages for SSC; Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Social Studies, basic Computer Science and basic Electronics, IT, Western Classical music and Indian classical music, Economics for HSC. Students follow a fixed pattern in choosing the subjects.

The exam is conducted only in pen and paper format.

Each of the examinations takes place simultaneously across the country, to ensure that questions are not leaked in advance across time zones. Security is usually high for these board examinations. The question papers are distributed by the overseeing board of education, and their contents are guarded closely until the exam begins. The examinations may include multiple sets of question papers as well. The candidates are issued identification passes in advance, which are presented to the staff at the examination site. The site itself must not be the same school where a candidate is from; to ensure impartiality, the candidate must travel to a different school to take the examination. For the same reason, the candidate may not identify himself/herself on the answer sheet except with an identity-masking number. Use of calculation aids other than logarithm tables, which are provided by the examination center, is prohibited.

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