CBSE Fail – Why thousands of students are being incorrectly graded in vital exams
A system that makes adolescents believe that one exam will decide the rest of their lives has problems. When that system then proceeds to be careless with that exam, goofing up in conducting and evaluating it, it is plain cruel.
According to a statement recently released by the CBSE, out of the 66,876 candidates who applied for re-evaluation, marks were changed for 4,632 cases. The statement came in reaction to media reports that had stated that 9,111 re-evaluation requests were received by the board, and hence marks were changed for every second paper.
A CBSE official added that of the 4,632 cases, "3,200 fall in the increase by 1-5 marks category, which otherwise is considered zero error".
But in a system where a few marks can decide the college that a student gets admission to, being slipshod with even one child's evaluation is indefensible.
The variations are huge: according to a report in the Times of India, Ishrita Gupta, a Nagpur student, saw her political science score go up by 22 marks after the re-evaluation. Also, re-evaluation is the second round of reassessment — before that, students had applied for re-totaling of marks, which had also seen results change dramatically, with a girl seeing her English score go up from 16 to to 80, to give just one example.
Class 12 scores determine the colleges and courses the students will be able to opt for. The competition, and the stress, is intense. Students prepare for the exams as if it were The Final Battle, with parents and schools often acting as the worriers to the warriors, adding to the pressure.
When students allow themselves no room for error, the least the exam conductors can do is match up.
With cut-offs for sought-after colleges soaring absurdly high, every single mark matters. With our unreasonable fascination for some “pedigree colleges”, a few marks do have the potential to alter the trajectory of a child’s life. While that is deeply unfair in itself, it is almost criminal to let a student’s hard work go waste because an evaluator forgot to mark one question.
The CBSE, as the most popular board, affects the most number of students. This year, 11,86,306 candidates registered for the Class 12 examinations. This is the number of students whose future the board has chosen to be so callous with.
Not all students have the confidence — or funds — to apply for reevaluation. And the process is not cheap. For a re-totalling, an applicant needs to pay Rs 500 per subject. For re-evaluation, students need to pay Rs 100 per question. The prohibitive costs effectively shut the door on many students to go for this option at all.
Many are so crushed with getting poor results, they have no will to fight. Sometimes, parents don’t believe their kids when told they were marked wrongly. The damage goes beyond the immediate college-course combination. Scoring badly in an exam they had slaved for and thought they had done well at can impact students’ self-confidence for years to come.
Also, the timing of the reevaluation ensures the revised marks are too little, too late, as the first few rounds of admissions in popular colleges are already over by then.
The “common mistakes” found during re-evaluation included giving zero marks for correct answers, not evaluating a series of answers, and errors in copying the marks on the first page of the answer booklet.
To be fair to the evaluators, human errors can never be completely eliminated. But these are hardly unforeseen circumstances, and this is not the first time such errors have been reported. Last year too, re-totalling of marks saw students’ marks go up from 42 to 90, from 9 to 45.
Why has the board not been able to come up with a way to fix these errors?
Instead, this year saw Class 12 students forced to sit for their Economics paper again, after question papers were leaked for both Class 10 and Class 12 exams.
The least the board could have done after this was not mess up the evaluations.
One way to deal with the problem can be to allow students to access their evaluated marksheets. This way, while children will be able to see where they went wrong, the board will be spared unnecessary re-evaluation requests.
Involving more people in the evaluation process can be another solution.
Ideally, Class 12 exams should not be the only gate to a brighter future. While that needs wider reforms in the education sector and a change in mindset on part of society, the least that can be done in the meanwhile is not trip students up on others’ mistakes.