The tall claims by both the State Government and the Board of Secondary Education to conduct this year’s High School Certificate (HSC) examinations in a fair manner have fallen apart.
The rhetoric made by School and Mass Education Minister Rabi Narayan Nanda on reforms in examinations has also proved futile as examinees and their parents and teachers are a worried lot for the goof-ups appearing in question papers.
Even the much-hyped arrangements to put the malpractices during the examinations at bay are turning out to be cropper in view of thousands of students having already been booked for using unfair means. More shockingly, about a dozen teachers performing duties as invigilators or centre superintendents have been pulled up for either dereliction of duties or helping the students adopt unfair means.
Even as the examinations are yet to be over, more than 1,500 students have already been booked for ‘malpractice’ for resorting to unfair means by Saturday.
The examinations for regular students would be over on Tuesday and for the ex-regular students the following day.
“While most of the students booked for malpractice are boys, it doesn’t mean that the girls are not resorting to unfair means,” said a teacher on examination duty, adding that many girl students are carrying written materials into examination halls and they are going unchecked for insufficient women members in the checking squads.
However, the shocking incidents of this year’s matriculation examination are about the blunders in the questions, particularly in multiple-choice short questions. In many questions, either no answer is matching the question or there is more than one correct answer in the options.
Similarly, the students and teachers also allege that some questions have come from outside the syllabus and many questions are so ambiguous that even the teachers are not able to understand them.