Which five states assign the most challenging board exams to students in grades 10 through 12?

In their Class 10 and 12 state board exams, students in West Bengal, Tripura, Maharashtra, Goa, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra had substantially harder exams, according to a PARAKH (a standard-setting organisation under the NCERT) review of English and Mathematics question papers from 17 school education boards.

Over the course of the previous year, PARAKH conducted the analysis the first of its type by the Union Government in an effort to create a formula for uniform assessment by school boards throughout the nation. The findings were recently released in the "Establishing Equivalency Across Boards" report, which was published by PARAKH.

West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (33.33 percent), Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (53.57 percent), Goa Board (44.66 percent), Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education (44.44 percent), and Tripura Board of Secondary Education (66.6 percent) had the highest percentage of "hard" questions, according to the report.

Students in Chattisgarh fared better than students in the other five Boards because a similar percentage (47.62 percent) of their papers had "easy" questions. Goa had no "easy" questions and only "medium" level questions (55.34 percent) in addition to "hard" questions. According to the PARAKH study, Maharashtra had an equal distribution of "easy," "hard," and "medium" questions.

A "large majority of learners exposed to relevant learning opportunities would be expected to answer correctly" on a subject is considered "easy" by PARAKH. "Hard" questions are ones that only a small percentage of students may possibly know the answers to. Experts determined the exercise's difficulty level, and the report stated that answers are "inherently subjective" and should be "interpreted with caution." Overall, PARAKH found that questions mostly ranged "from easy to medium difficult level" across the 17 school education boards, which include those of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Manipur, Odisha, Nagaland, Himachal, and Kerala, aside from CISCE, which administers the ICSE and ISC exams.

"There could be a lot of reasons for this, but it doesn't aid students in meeting increasing expectations. Therefore, the research recommended that boards develop question papers that foster creativity and imagination in students. With the exception of the Chhattisgarh board, the CISCE (38.39 percent) and the Odisha Board of Secondary Education (40 percent) had the largest percentage of "easy" questions.

The Board of Secondary Education Haryana (HBSE or BSEH) question papers had the highest percentage of items (64.71 percent) that tested rote memory, followed by Goa (57.89 percent), Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education (53.13 percent), and Odisha (50.77 percent). The analysis also examined the "cognitive demand" of the question papers across the 17 school boards. However, the majority of comprehension-testing questions were found in the Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (87.76 percent), followed by the Nagaland Board of Secondary Education (73 percent), Tripura Board of Secondary Education (61.7 percent), and Kerala Board of Public Examination (61.54 percent).