Son's tuition has now added a third reference book for science, on top of NCERT and the school's own worksheets. He spends more time working out which book a question came from than doing the questions. The tuition teacher says NCERT 'is not enough anymore'. His school teacher says finish NCERT properly first. Parents of kids who wrote class 10 in the last year or two, what did they use?
No class 10 experience at home yet, so discount this. From the other end, the first-year undergraduates who arrive having worked one book thoroughly are in much better shape than those who skimmed four. I'd ask the tuition teacher a precise question: which chapters, and which kinds of questions, does NCERT not cover? If the answer is 'everything', it's a sales line.
Is the third book for the board exam, or for some olympiad or test series the centre also runs? At ours (younger kids, maths) the extra books always turned out to be for their own tests.
My elder one wrote his class 10 boards recently. For science he did NCERT line by line, the NCERT exemplar for the tougher questions, and one book of sample papers from December. That was it. His tuition also tried to add books and he quietly stopped carrying them after a month. What helped more than any extra book was timed practice with the sample papers. Your son sounds like he's doing the work, which is the hard part ❤️
Our elder daughter wrote class 10 this March. NCERT plus exemplar covered the paper well. The case-based questions were the ones that needed practice, and for those the board's own sample papers were more useful than the reference books. The reference books earned their place in one area: physics numericals, where NCERT has too few.
Mostly agree, but I'd be careful with 'covered well'. Depends what he's aiming for. My daughter's class 9 tests this year already have more application questions than the NCERT examples, and the school says class 10 will be the same. NCERT for concepts, yes, and some practice beyond it doesn't hurt. Just not three books of it 🙂
Physics numericals is a fair point. That's where he's weakest. We'll keep one book for that and drop the other two.
Ours is in class 6, so I'm guessing here, not speaking from experience. If he can't tell where a question is from, it sounds like the tuition sets work from all three books in the same week. Could you ask them to set from one book per chapter? That alone might cut the confusion, even if the books stay.
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