Exams? You ask, you answer

How many times after having had your confidence crushed by a tougher-than-hell question paper have you yearned to set the paper? Well, if you were in Gurukul Grammar Senior Secondary School, a CBSE school in Guwahati, you could have your wish. But before you decide to shift to the Northeast, be warned — life is anything but easy for people who ask questions.

The new system adopted by the school is called "reverse learning". To start with, every student from classes IX to XII is asked to come up with a 100-mark question paper on each subject --- an exercise that sends all students scurrying to their books.

Next, the class teacher entrusts 10 of her best students to cull the inputs from the papers their classmates have submitted and come up with better ones. In the final stage, the class teacher collects the 10 question papers and prepares the final question paper. The teacher can accept the best paper, mix and match all the 10 or re-set them if the students' questions are below par. Explained principal B.K. Bhuyan: "One of the benefits of this system is that it compels each student to study. You can set a paper only if you know the answer."

The system also involves evaluation by the top 10 students. "In order to avoid partiality, the names and roll numbers of each student are replaced by a secret code," Bhuyan said.  Students are warming to the new responsibility. "This has reduced the dread of examination and there has been a tendency to study in order to come up with the best questions," a teacher said.