TN rolls back decision of giving Class 11 students choice of 3 or 4 core subjects

The School Education Department has rolled back its decision to give students of Class 11 in Tamil Nadu the options to take up either three or four core subjects from the 2020-21 academic year on Monday. Students will continue to take up four core subjects.

In September last year, the education department of Tamil Nadu had said that students in Class 11 of the Tamil Nadu state syllabus can opt to study either three core subjects or four core subjects along with language papers for their board exams. The government of Tamil Nadu issued an order to this effect at that time, which stated that from the academic year 2020-21, students of Class 11 can choose to write their board exams for 500 marks instead of the 600 marks at present.

They had suggested that this decision was an attempt to ease the burden on the students and also enable them to find time to prepare for competitive entrance examinations like the NEET and IIT-JEE. Speaking to The NewsMinute, a senior official in the state school education department said, "This would give students a choice to study only what is necessary to clear the entrance exams for medicine and engineering. The burden and the related mental stress on the students are reduced if they opt to study just three core subjects instead of four."

The present streams are Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Maths; Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, Maths; Commerce, Accountancy, Economics, Computer Science/Business Maths. According to the earlier government order, students in the science stream can choose to avoid Maths completely, if they want to write NEET and qualify for the medical entrance. Similarly, students who aspire to become engineers can now choose to avoid Biology altogether in their higher secondary curriculum.