The University of Kerala on Saturday decided to register a police complaint over a recent incident in which a lecturer of a self-financing engineering college at Kadakkal allegedly tampered with answer sheets to help students whom she privately coached. The incident came to light in February this year.
The charge against the lecturer is that she made five students rewrite some answers on university answer sheets procured by the lecturer when she got their original answer sheets for revaluation.
At least one of these students had scored below 10 in the original valuation. After revaluation, the student received more than 70 per cent marks. This discrepancy alerted varsity officials to the possibility of malpractice.
When shown the “rewritten” answer sheets, the original evaluators told the university’s examination wing that they would never have awarded single digit marks for those answers. Moreover, they also asserted that these were not the answers they had evaluated in the first place.
At a subsequent university hearing, the lecturer at first refused to admit any malpractice on her part. However, when it was pointed out to her that the handwriting in which the false number of the candidate was written on the counterfoil of the answer sheet and that on the first page of the revaluated answer sheet did not match, the lecturer reportedly admitted to writing the latter in her own hand.
The lecturer also admitted to the three-member inquiry panel headed by the Controller of Examinations that she had burnt some pages of the original answer booklet and had pinned on the “rewritten” sheets. She admitted to helping five students in this manner.
The examination standing committee of the then syndicate had recommended that the lecturer concerned be permanently barred from examination-related work and that a hearing be conducted for the five students concerned.
The Pro-Vice Chancellor had reportedly then wrote on the file that a criminal case should be registered on the matter.
“The university also plans to conduct a departmental inquiry to find out how a lecturer at a self-financing college was assigned to revalue the answer sheets of the very students she coaches,” a top university official said here.
