CBSE to automate question paper setting

NEW DELHI, 29th November, 2011:- The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) proposes to automate the process of generation and delivery of question papers for Classes IX and X. It will shortly engage an information technology firm, to be selected through a competitive bidding process, to develop the software. The board will prepare a large question bank, and the software will then select questions for the question paper for every subject according to some set parameters. The questions would include textual, pictorial or multiple choice. The software will have a wide choice of questions since thousands of questions will be available in the question bank, and more will be added every year, according to a CBSE spokesman. The system will be used for generating question papers for the summative assessments (SA), which are written examinations conducted by CBSE twice a year as part of its Continuous and Comprehensive Education (CCE) process. CBSE expects a lot of valuable time to be saved by automating the process. A member of the staff of a school will have to log into an online portal to generate a question paper, which will be unique to that school, at least for that day. The paper will then have to be printed and distributed in the examination halls.