Students, teachers and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) itself have faced challenges due to the new board examination format, introduced due to the uncertainties of the COVID-19 format this year. The pressure of holding two board exams in the year and setting papers with only multiple choice questions (MCQs) for the first time has led to squeezed timelines, faults in the vetting process and multiple mistakes in question papers.
“Usually, the CBSE approaches you three to four months before the examination to work on question papers, and there are multiple sets produced. Then it goes to a monitoring committee,” said a Delhi-based teacher who has previously set question papers for the CBSE, and did not wish to be named.
“But this time, they came to me less than a month before exams were due to start, and wanted questions in a new format also. I declined as there was not enough time to do a good job,” she added.
Tremendous pressure
CBSE officials admit they have been “working under tremendous pressure”. Because of the unusual decision to hold a board examination in December, apart from the usual one in March, the standard timelines of the process have been squeezed drastically, said one official who did not wish to be named. With 75 subjects for Class 10 and 140 subjects in Class 12, it has been a “humongous task” to set multiple sets of papers in time.
There is only a select limited pool of external experts entrusted with setting examination papers, and a similar small group of moderators, according to Board sources. CBSE officials cannot be part of the multilevel vetting process in order to prevent leakages, so some of this year’s question paper snafus took them by surprise as well.
Board blindsided
Whether it was the misogynistic passage that appeared in a reading comprehension exercise in a Class 10 English paper, or a politically-uncomfortable query in the Class 12 Sociology paper, CBSE was not privy to the contents until they appeared on students’ desks on the morning of the exam, leaving the Board blindsided by subsequent controversies.
Although the Board provides guidelines to external paper setters which it says were violated by those who crafted these contentious questions, some officials said it was the rushed timeline that explained why the vetting process failed to stop such violations. Now, a new expert committee has been set up to review and monitor the Board’s processes, especially given the new reality of dual examinations.
Students and teachers also raised complaints about the multiple choice question paper format and the reduced exam duration of just 90 minutes.
“We have done our best to prepare students using sample papers and mock tests, but you must remember that most of these children, especially in Class 10, have not even attended classes for the last one and a half years,” said the principal of a CBSE school in the capital. “It is hard for them to adapt to a new format, and it is clear some paper setters have not correctly judged the amount of time taken to solve some questions in the MCQ set-up,” added the principal.
Apart from the controversial questions that grabbed the headlines and were raised in Parliament, other minor paper errors have largely been ignored except by hapless students. One Class 12 paper had a question where two of the four answer options were identical. In another set of the Class 10 exam, some questions had no directions, only answer options, leaving students confused.
Halfway through the exams, the Board issued new instructions, directing students to enter their answer choices using capital letters alongside the blacked out circles on the optical mark recognition (OMR) answer sheet, as evaluators manually checking the results found it hard to decipher small alphabets.
“So what will happen to the papers we have already completed? How can we trust that our answers were judged correctly? This MCQ format has just added worry for us this year,” said a Class 10 student from a school in the NCR area.
