As a great relief to thousands of students from the science stream, the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Examination (MSBSHSE) has postponed the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) papers of chemistry and biology by nearly a month.

This has been done so students and teachers get sufficient time for revision under the new revised syllabus.

The chemistry paper has been rescheduled to March 26 from February 27 and the Biology paper to March 17 from March 4. All other papers will be held as per schedule.

The first batch of students to be appearing for their class XII exams under the revised syllabus from February 21 onwards had complained to the board that they were struggling to cope with the new syllabus for these subjects.

Also, the Maharashtra Federation of Junior College Teachers had threatened to boycott the HSC exams claiming that the upgraded syllabi for biology and chemistry, which are on par with the CBSE counterparts was too heavy and students did not have ample time to complete them. Despite the state having announced the timetables for both the class X and XII board exams well before July in 2012 itself, school education minister Rajendra Darda said the changes were made on humanitarian grounds.

I received a lot of SMSs and other messages from students across the state that they felt they would not have enough time to revise between the two papers. We are taking them into consideration as this is the first time the class XII students and teachers had to study the upgraded syllabus. Such changes will not be made every year, Darda said.

Darda and the state board chairperson Sarjerao Jadhav had met on Thursday to discuss and decide on this issue.

The timetable has been up on the boards website for a year now. The teachers should have come forth with this complaint earlier, Jadhav said.

Although some students are happy with the change, some are not.

The students are worried that postponing the chemistry paper to March 26 will not give them enough time to prepare for the MHT-CET 2013, to be held in second week of May.

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Biology, chemistry exams put off