Evaluation Season: School teachers sweat it out for a ‘pittance’

The next day, ready to begin her work, Lobo reached school only to realise she’d have to first spend three hours supervising SSC examinations still under way then, apart from completing classes for her Class IX students. Five of the eight hours she’d planned to spend correcting SSC papers vanished.

[related-post]

While the Board’s norms dictate that papers have to be corrected only at school, examiners are usually forced to take the papers home — something nobody openly admits. The following day, Lobo also adds a Rs 60 (one-way) autorickshaw ride to her moderator’s school to get further instructions, a cycle that continues for the next 10 days.

“We have to keep the papers safe, so cannot risk taking it by train or bus. The bundle is also heavy to carry,” Lobo says. She has spent Rs 1,200 only on travelling to and from her moderator’s school in 10 days, while the board provides a maximum of Rs 150 for travel.

Across the city, teachers are now criticising the “pittance” they receive for the correction work. Besides the evaluation, examiners also enter the marks on three separate sheets, check for proper barcodes and segregate the improperly coded papers — clerical work that is invariably time-consuming.

While the remuneration is slightly better for CBSE teachers, the pressures are not very different.CBSE teachers correct papers at either of two OnScreen Marking Centres (OSM) in Mumbai — Kendriya Vidyalaya, Thane and DAV Public School, Airoli — where answer papers arrive in scanned form on computer screens.

For Powai-resident Puja Kaura, an English paper examiner from RN Podar School, Santacruz, it was the Airoli centre. Her daily prayer was always that the software for paper evaluation should work.

Only in its second year, the on-screen correction software still needs to be mastered by CBSE examiners, despite an orientation.

“Sometimes, the PCs are not working or are extremely slow. This is besides glitches,” she says, referring to some system errors teachers noticed.Each centre sees two head examiners and around 20 examiners and almost all of them have trouble commuting to the centre. “The commute in a city like Mumbai is the issue, not the actual valuation. Also, for these 10 days, we are relieved from school work and spend a dedicated amount of time at the evaluation centres,” she adds.

Unlike CBSE, teachers in the ICSE board physically correct papers, not online. After spending approximately 25 minutes on a single paper, examiners finish correcting around 20 papers each day. “We are relieved of our school duties during the evaluation, but still think we should get more time to correct the papers. The time is not enough to properly valuate language papers and do the clerical work involved in the process,” said one ICSE examiner.

mumbai.newsline@expressindia.com