Non availabity of Syllabus

Syllabus is the most important component of any education board. It is one of the primary document to be provided to students whenenver they enroll for any course. According to Cambridge dictionary, syllabus is “(a plan showing) the subjects or books to be studied in a particular course, especially a course that leads to an exam”.

Designing a syllabus is the responsibility of the evaluation and certification authority. In Indian education system syllabus is designed by Education Boards and Universities. Each education board design the syllabus based on guidelines issued by NCERT (National Council for Education Research and Training) or SCERT (State Council for Education Research and Training). The syllabus is made available to teachers and students, so that they can follow it and prepare for final assessment/evaluation.

Prior to introduction of Internet, the syllabus of such Boards and Universities was not so easily available. Boards use to print the copy of syllabus and made it available on office counters and the board offices in district headquarters and one was required to approach the board to obtain the copy.

Internet has proved itself a boon in the field of eduation. Almost everything is available on click, just google (perform internet search using any search engine like google) it and the information is available.

In 2015, the Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education (HPBOSE) decided to change the name of subject known as Informatics Practices to Computer Science and also changed the syllabus of subject. Upto 2015 HPBOSE followed CBSE syllabus of Informatics Practices (Visual Basic 6 aka VB-Oracle) which CBSE changed somewhere about 2010 to (Java-MySQL).

I was hoping that this change is going to be for the betterment of the students because the combination of VB6 and Oracle was out of use. I was expecting some core computer science where student can learn more advanced and useful technology. But to my surprise I found many things that was unexpected. I will write another blog on my observation on the new syllabus sometime later.

Syllabus not Availabe on HP Baord Site 

Now there comes a bad news, if you are interested to know the contents of this so called new syllabus, you can not get is so easily, because the copy of syllabus is not easily available. One have to rely on the syllabus printed on the preface of the text books published by some of the private publishers and have no method to validate it. Yes what I want to say here is that the syllabus is not available even on official Board’s website. There is no section on the official website of HPBOSE, which is hpbose.org, where you can find syllabus of any subject forget the Computer Science alone. I dont think that HPBOSE is publishing the syllabus, the way it use to do before internet. This make it more difficult for teachers, students as well as parents to obtain the latest copy of the syllabus prescribed by the Board.