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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, FEB 12: The Central Board of Secondary Education CBSE today admitted before the Delhi High Court that re-evaluation of answer sheets for the tenth and twelfth boards in 1997 and 1998 had revealed that there were discrepancies in the marking system.
Additional Solicitor General ASG Madan Lokur, appearing for CBSE, presented before a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Devinder Gupta and Justice K S Gupta subject-wise and medium-wise statistics for the two boards of the previous two years which showed the discrepancies.
In the twelfth board mathematics exam last year, 4,0648 students appeared through English medium and 4750 of them, applied for rechecking. The rechecking of their answer sheets revealed that 143 of them were wrongly marked.
Similar was the fate of 89 students who appeared in the chemistry exams English medium for the same board last year. The statistics proved that of the 20,507 students who appeared in the exams, 2,186 applied for rechecking, and 89 of them were wrongly failed or were given lesser marks.
The marks of 14 of the 20,429 students who appeared in the physics twelfth exams last year were corrected after rechecking, according to the CBSE statistics.
The rechecking of the twelfth board answer sheets in question for the three subjects in 1997 established that the marks of 104 mathematics students, 33 chemistry students and 14 physics students were wrongly adjudged.
The situation for the tenth boards of 1997 and 1998 were more or less the same with 25 students were wrongly marked in the English-A course in 1997 and 28 in 1998. Thirty-six students were either failed or were poorly marked in their mathematics papers in 1997 and 51 in 1998.
Discrepancies were also noticed in the marking process of those who appeared through Hindi and other medium of instructions during the past two years when their answer sheets of those who applied for rechecking were counter checked.
The statistics were filed in response to a public interest petition of parents forum for meaningful education seeking transparency in the functioning of the CBSE and returning of the answersheets to students once the results were declared. It also wanted that the CBSE should not destroy the answer sheets.
The bench took cognisance of the statistics and fixed the matter for further hearing on February 16.
Counsel for petitioner P Sharda submitted that it has been noticed that the CBSE had time to time been changing its figure of the total number of students who appeared in the boards.
Citing an example, he said CBSE in its affidavit filed on September one last year had stated that 414,812 students appeared for the tenth board and 229,985 students took the twelfth board in 1998, but in their additional affidavit filed on February three this year, they changed it to 409,695 for the tenth and 222,000 for the twelfth board.
Similarly, there were discrepancies in the total number of students who appeared 396,654 on September one, 1998 and 388,830 on February three, 1999, those who passed 284,130 on the first date and 281,269 on the next date and those who applied for rechecking 17588 and 19371 respectively in the mathematics paper.
He said the number of errors claimed by CBSE for the tenth board was 946 and for the twelfth board was 1,200 with the percentage of errors varying from 4.15 to 7.17.
