Indian pupils receive their exam scores

DUBAI // Thousands of Grade 10 Indian pupils in the UAE received the results of their March examinations yesterday.

The standard examinations are taken in Indian high schools across the world and evaluated in Delhi by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

Most schools and students were upbeat yesterday, saying they had fared well under the new system, which made two major changes to ease the pressure on pupils. Pupils could opt to take exclusively internal exams instead of Delhi-marked exams, and the final mark of all exams - whether internal and external - included 60 per cent of marks earned throughout the year.

"There is no undue pressure and everyone is much more relaxed," said Vandana Marwaha, principal of the Delhi Private School (DPS) in Sharjah.

In 2011, most pupils in the UAE preferred the public exams for fear it could hamper their admission to high schools in India.

Things seemed a little different this year. For instance in DPS, an overwhelming majority of the 220 pupils - nearly 190 - took the internal exams.

In contrast, more than 200 of the 286 pupils from the New Indian Model School in Dubai opted for the public exams.

The school presented 34 students for the CBSE Grade 10 exam, and all of them passed.

"My daughter did the board exams," Jaishree Sridhar, mother of Priyanka, a pupil at the Indian High School who scored a perfect GPA.

"If she had known her percentage, she would have been happier. But this is a great system as it takes off the pressure."

Not a single pupil from the Indian High School took the internal exam. Instead, all the 600 chose to write the public exams and of them, 13.2 per cent students scored a perfect GPA.