Bengaluru professor shocked by Class 10 AI exam – Bengaluru professor shocked by Class 10 AI exam where students were asked to code a simple chatbot for 4 marks

A Bengaluru-based assistant professor of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) sparked an online debate after expressing disbelief over the complexity of a Class 10 artificial intelligence (AI) exam.

The problem asked students to write Python programs for tasks such as creating a simple chatbot, sentiment analysis and handwritten number recognition – tasks typically found in higher education or specialized courses.

In a post on

“Our relative called today to get help for their 10th grade child’s AI exam. I asked for the question paper and was shocked. How to write a ‘Python program for a simple Chatbot’ for 4 points? Is the school serious,” he asked.

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The post, which has been viewed more than 72,000 times so far, was flooded with comments from social media users who sympathized with Subramani’s concerns and questioned the suitability of such advanced tasks for young students.

One user said: “IT can be written in a few lines, but that’s not what children should learn. They must learn to explore math and science computationally, graph data from physics experiments or plot linear equations they encountered in high school, and write code to simulate the inverse square law.

“Very high expectations! I hope coding on a console doesn’t get overtaken by scribbling on paper,” another user added.

Several users highlighted the irony in the syllabus, with one user saying: “None of these questions really help build technology in practice by and large.”

However, a few users presented a different perspective. One of the users pointed out that an extremely simple chatbot could be built using basic Python: “An extremely simple, hardcoded chatbot can be created using a dictionary in Python, where the question is the key and the answer the value. I remember implementing this chatbot at the beginning of my studies.”

Another added: “I have seen similar chatbot codes in my brother’s Class 9 book.”

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While the integration of AI and Python into school curricula is seen as progressive, several users felt that the level of difficulty needs to be balanced to ensure that students gain meaningful insights rather than struggling with such tasks.