Grading worries choke CBSE helpline

Students and parents availing of the counselling-by-phone service offered by the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) have been asking new questions this year.

These new questions pertain mainly to the grading system, based on continuous and comprehensive evaluation by schools, which has been introduced with students taking the CBSE’s Class X board exam this year. The grading system will continue with future batches, too, but, as the CBSE has already been announced, the Class X board examination will become optional from 2011.

Since the grades earned by the students will have a bearing on their final results, the students and their parents are understandably anxious to know how the new system works. Jaydeb Kar, principal of Calorx Public School in Mundra, is one of the counsellors for CBSE students in Gujarat.

“Apart from the usual questions about the exams and exam-related stress, parents are keen to know more about the grading system that has introduced from this year,” Kar said. “I have received nearly 131 calls so far for information about the grading system. Parents want to know how the grading will be done.”

The first phase of the counseling-by-phone service began on February 1, and will continue up to April 8, 2010.

This is the 13th consecutive year that the CBSE is providing a tele-counselling service for examinees and parents to help them overcome anxiety and examination-related stress. To make the service more accessible to students, the CBSE, for the first time, has set up a ‘centralised call system’.

The students can now call a national toll-free helpline number - which is 1800 11 7002 - to get in touch with counsellors for one-to-one telephonic counselling, from 8 am to midnight. While the operators answer queries of a general nature, they also connect callers to the counsellors for professional counselling.
Incidentally, Jaydeb Kar of Calorx school, at Mundra also provides counselling on his own phone. Students can contact him on 9998077355. Kar said the service was provided to students free of cost and the people providing the counselling were doing so voluntarily.

“This year, as many as 52 principals, trained counsellors from CBSE-affiliated private and government schools, psychologists and social scientists are operating the helpline from locations in different cities of the country,” he said. “There are three helpline centres outside India, too - at Kuwait, Dubai and Doha (capital of Qatar).”