Students who appeared for the B.Ed. examination of Mangalore University on Wednesday are a worried lot as nearly half of the questions were not related to their syllabus.
A few students said that questions for 38 marks of the 80 mark Educational Psychology paper were out-of-syllabus.
Unrelated questions
Producing a copy of the question paper and the syllabus, the students pointed out that the first question for 10 marks, “Discuss the nature and scope of psychology”, had nothing to do with what they had studied. They had been prescribed “Nature and scope of educational psychology”.
Two more questions of 10 marks each, which the students said were not from the syllabus were: “Explain programmed learning and its types” and “Discuss the special needs and problems of adolescents”. “Explain the stages of intellectual development as propounded by Piaget” for five marks and “Write the definition and types of reinforcement” for three marks were also not part of the syllabus. They blamed the Board of Examiners (BoE) for their predicament.
Choice
Although the students agreed that there were optional questions for them to answer, they said that question papers should not contain questions not related to the syllabus.
Section A of the question paper had two sets of two questions. Students had to answer one of the two sets compulsorily.
But they could not answer three sets of questions from Wednesday’s paper as one of the two questions in these sets was out of syllabus. As a result, they were compelled to stick to a particular set in the three sections. This defeated the very purpose of providing options, they said and urged the university to give grace marks to them.
D. Shivalingaiah, Registrar (Evaluation), Mangalore University, told The Hindu that the university would seek an explanation from the BoE in this regard. After verifying the extent of questions that were out of the syllabus, the university would decide on the matter. “I can say that no injustice will be done to students during evaluation. Their interests will be taken care of,” he said.
Prof. Shivalingaiah said that conducting another examination was not a feasible solution.
