The University of Kerala is planning to organise centralised camps for revaluation of answer sheets after it came to light a couple of weeks ago that a lecturer in a self-financing engineering college at Kadakkal had tampered with some answer sheets sent to her for revaluation to help students she privately coached.
In the coming week, the university examination committee will hear the five students who allegedly wrote answers of some questions on answer sheets provided by the lecturer after she received their original answer sheets of the B.Tech. examinations for revaluation. At least one of these students had scored below 10 in the original valuation. On revaluation by the said lecturer, the student received more than 70 per cent marks. This is how the malpractice by the lecturer came to the attention of the university.
“On noticing the huge difference between the two scores, we sent for the original evaluators who told us they would never have given four or five marks for such answers. They also asserted that these were not the answers that they evaluated and that there appears to be some foul play in the matter,” Controller of Examinations Madhukumar told The Hindu .
It was then that the university sent for the lecturer from the Kadakkal college who had conducted the revaluation. At first she refused to admit to any wrongdoing before a three-member inquiry panel headed by the Controller. When confronted with a discrepancy in the handwritings which had recorded the false number of the candidate in the answer sheet counterfoil with the university and in the first page of the revaluated answer sheet, the lecturer reportedly admitted to writing the latter in her own hand.
Later, Mr. Madhukumar said, she also admitted to getting some students to write fresh answers and pinning those sheets to the original answer booklet. “She said she had burnt the relevant pages of the original answer booklet,” he said. The lecturer also reportedly admitted to helping five of her students in a similar fashion.
The incident has at once exposed the fragile integrity of the evaluation process in the university. The Controller and other university officials who are associated with revaluation work admitted that the only reason why the university was able to detect this malpractice was because of the huge difference between the original mark and the revaluated score.
“Of the 42 engineering colleges under the university, only three are in the government/aided sector. So far the practise has been to use only teachers from these colleges for valuation/revaluation. These teachers can hardly cope with the number of answer sheets to be graded. If something happens like this and the culprit is a teacher at a self-financing college, the university can do precious little by way of punishment,” a senior varsity official pointed out.
Some top officials said they were also worried that such malpractice may not be restricted to one lecturer in one college. If one lecturer can get hold of blank answer sheets of the university, so can the others. Such malpractice can also theoretically take place inside the examination/revaluation wing too, they pointed out.
Centralising the revaluation of answer sheets can only be a first step towards ensuring greater integrity of the examination process in the university, they said.
