Telangana govt to reduce pass marks for Children with Special Needs from this academic year

Hyderabad: In a major boon for Children with Special Needs (CwSN) and their parents, the State government is providing several exemptions and concessions especially reducing the pass marks from 35 to 20 in all subjects from classes VI to X and SSC Public Exams from this academic year. This apart, children with hearing impairment, who […]

Hyderabad: In a major boon for Children with Special Needs (CwSN) and their parents, the State government is providing several exemptions and concessions especially reducing the pass marks from 35 to 20 in all subjects from classes VI to X and SSC Public Exams from this academic year.

This apart, children with hearing impairment, who are required to study only one language out of three, students with other specific challenges have been exempted from studying and writing one language out of the three.

To this effect, the School Education department has issued the GO MS 27 as per which, qualifying and passing marks for students with intellectual challenge particularly autism spectrum disorder and mental illness have been reduced from 35 to 10. However, the pass marks for other CwSN is 20 instead of 35.

Apart from providing separate answer scripts which are thicker, certain grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, graphs, geometry and maps will be ignored for CwSN during the examinations.

They will also be provided with assistive devices like calculators, computers, abacus, tyler frame, magnifying glass, video magnifier, Braille slate, geometry kit, Braille measuring tape etc., as per the requirement in the examination. In the case for children with visual impairment, alternate types of questions in lieu of descriptive questions requiring visual inputs will be provided.

The CwSN will also get a compensatory time of 20 minutes for each hour in the examinations. For an examination with a duration of 1 hour, a compensatory time of 20 minutes will be allotted. Similarly, for a three hour examination, a compensatory time of 60 minutes will be extended.

Further, to facilitate easy access, the government has decided to do away with the jumbling process during the examination to all CwSN and allot them in the same or nearby school as per the feasibility.

Depending on the specific needs, these exemptions and concessions will be extended from this academic year 2022-23, in addition to existing provisions including provision of scribe, exemption/concessions on payment of examination fee for the SSC Public Examinations.