While the State Government fails to provide free textbooks to students at State-run schools in time-bound manner, test papers and guide books appear to be “saviour” for the students for their examinations.
With the unavailability of textbooks, the students are now increasingly depending upon the test papers for their academic preparation and annual examinations in all the classes.
Taking advantage of Government’s inefficiency to provide free text
books to students in schools, various teachers’ associations and private companies are launching the test papers in the market.
While test papers (from the class 2 to 7) are being published by a teacher’s association, another group is managing the publication (from class 8 to 10) for the students. Apart from teachers’ associations, test papers are also made available by many national level publishing firms in Odisha.
They are publishing test papers not only for the students enrolled in Government schools, but also for the private schools.
The test papers and guide books help the students for their examination preparation and secure good percentages and marks at the annual examinations.
As part of aiding students for better preparations, the test papers are coming with models and sets of questions.
Instead of using the text book as the reference, students are completely depending upon test papers. At times, they fail to give the correct answers if the questions are not from the test papers, reveal eminent educationists.
As the Government could not provide the text books till the period of half yearly examination in schools, this has been another reason behind huge purchases of test papers in the State, opined a few others.
On the other hand, the text books are not available in open market While the private school students are easily getting text books in time, their counterparts in Government schools are awaiting for the text books for months.
Even the block and district education officials are not paying any importance on the issue.
Amidst such a scenario, the test paper publication firms and teachers associations are earning huge profit, sources said.