Students seek online answers to crack board exams

The internet is proving to be a handy source of help for those preparing to appear for the upcoming Class 10 board exams. There are more than 40,000 posts on online forums set up for ICSE and CBSE students and thousands of visitors downloading sample question papers everyday.

Jeevika Rohira, 15, a Class 10 student from Villa Theresa High School, Peddar Road, logs on to the website set up by the ICSE board, downloads sample question papers and solves them. The website (http://cisce.org/) is free and does not require a login or password.

"The sample papers available on the website are up-to-date with changes in the syllabus. The practice papers in the printed question books are picked from previous years' papers and are sometimes based on the old syllabus," said Rohira.

For now, Rohira is solving maths and science papers, which are evaluated by her school teachers.

For CBSE students, even the board's director and controller of examinations are available for online counselling. Students' queries posted on the website (cbse.nic.in) are promptly answered.

Private websites, too, provide discussion boards, where students post queries, which are answered by the site's registered members.

"Administrators monitor the website to keep it spam-free," said Mithilesh Keshari, director of one such website.

Keshari said that their website for CBSE students (cbseguess.com) gets 5 million hits per day while the one for ICSE students (icseguess.com) gets a million hits.

"Earlier students went to libraries or spoke to teachers, but now they use the internet to solve problems. It is important that the right people moderate the discussion boards," said Lalitha Hariharan, principal, Rizvi Springfield School, Bandra.