Maharashtra State Board Syllabus Lacks Behind

Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE), Maharashtra has partially upgraded the class 12 syllabus for the academic year 2012-13. The teachers and students are saying that the changed syllabus lacks behind compared to the CBSE syllabus.

The MSBSHSE Board has upgraded the syllabus for Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics to ensure students appearing for the entrance exams can compete with CBSE level. The remaining subjects will be upgraded next academic session.

"There is certainly a difference between the books of our state board and that of the CBSE. First if you just look at the thickness the variation is visible. CBSE books are much thicker. The reason is that CBSE teachers each topic in much greater detail than us," said Sameer Phale, Lecturer at Ambedkar College (Deekshabhoomi).

The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) sets the syllabus for the CBSE students.

The state board's chairman Sarjerao Jadhav said, "We have taken great efforts to upgrade our syllabus. All the topics that are mentioned in the syllabus are par with any other board,"

The process of upgrading the state's syllabus to bring it at par with that of CBSE started a few years ago. Gradually each year successive classes saw their syllabus upgraded, with class12 being done this year. The common syllabus is being prepared for the common entrance tests. The central government had been pushing for single entrance tests for undergraduate engineering and medical courses.

The first single common entrance test, National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET), for undergraduate medical courses kicks off from next year and Maharashtra students too will participate. But some of the students believe that the state's syllabus has not still not been upgraded. Two such students from nagpur have knocked on the judiciary's doors against NEET citing syllabus as one of the reason.

While Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court has given time to the respondents till December 13, it observed that "We find that the policy of holding NEET can't be flouted. However prior to doing that we are of the view that it will be necessary that the syllabus for entire country is common and the students should be put on same level before they appeared in the test".