Chennai: After receiving several complaints from harried parents and students regarding the pressure on students due to implementation of the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has now asked all schools affiliated with it to go easy on giving homework to students.

The Board has asked all affiliated schools to reduce the amount of homework they give to students everyday as well as the tests that students are made to give as part of the formative assessment.

A circular issued recently by CBSE Chairman Vineet Joshi said that several parents, teachers and students had said that under the CCE system, too many tests, assignments, projects, homework and review tests were being given to students.

The circular added that many projects that were given to students to be done at home led to no real learning as they were completed by either the parents or siblings of the students or outsourced to entrepreneurs.

Joshi said that implementation of the CCE system did not include testing and examining students in a formal manner everyday. He clarified that assessing students on a continuous basis in a cyclic manner was part of formative assessment.

"Formative assessment needs to be taken up with discrimination and after consulting all teachers so that several projects are not given to the students at the same time," he said.

Joshi also stated in his circular to affiliated schools that giving students excessive amounts of homework and projects was not really a part of CCE. He said that CCE involved making students collaborate for projects and research work in groups along with balancing projects with assignments.