Council For The Indian School Certificate Examinations [Cisce] — ICSE Semester-1 Board Exams

I, a student of grade 10 in an ICSE school, write on behalf of all my fellow 10th graders who are to write their semester one board examinations this November.
I am studying in Kerala where Covid Cases are not taking a break from increasing. This leaves us in a situation to give exams from home where many o[censored]s have unstable network connections. If there is a power/network outage in many places, we won't be able to give the exam on time, the exams which decide our fate for admissions in good colleges in 11th std. Many o[censored]s cannot afford to buy laptops or smartphones to carry it to the school to give exams and not all o[censored]s have stable network connections by which we can give the exams from home so I humbly request you to consider the cancellation of the Semester -1 examination with respect to the following:

1) Mass cheating
Though some schools have diligent teachers and obedient students, many schools do not. In such schools, there is mass cheating taking place on a regular basis. In my view, leaving the responsibility of proctoring to the hands of the school will be a grave mistake, and certain students are eagerly waiting for this same mistake, which is an opportunity for them to exploit the situation to their benefit.

2) Lack of hardware and software
In lines of the above argument, while some students are privileged enough to have access to laptops and desktops with proper webcams and a stable wifi connection, a significant portion of the students struggle to connect with the highly unreliable cellular data on their tiny smartphones, for many of whom, the ability to keep their video on at a decent position whilst answering an exam, is practically impossible. Also, with all due respect, the council is completely new to the online mode of testing and hence it is certainly difficult to come up with a flawless platform for a smooth conduction of this examination. The probability of technical errors being high, and the lack of experience in students too, clearly point out why this would not work out.

3) Inability to conduct the exam offline
As all are aware, the COVID situation in the country is still not favourable enough for offline conduction of exams. Moreover, most schools lack the facility and infrastructure to conduct online exams on their premises. The short notice of less than 80 days that was provided to the students does not help either. Also, a full fledged offline exam at this point is further pushed towards irrelevance by the fact that vaccinations for those under 18 has still not started, and it is extremely unsafe for them to walk out of their homes unvaccinated, to a place where hundreds of other students gather in a manner possibly against COVID protocols.

As an alternative to the online semester 1 exams, I suggest that the school prelim marks be considered instead of the board marks.

I sincerely hope you have gone through the aforementioned reasons and believe you are convinced of the need to immediately cancel this examination. It will come as a great relief to over 2 lakh students, who shall always be indebted to you for this favour.