This year, as thousands of students write their class X and XII Board exams, one class VIII student with autism was somewhat anxious. “My son’s scribe was not used to seeing a student with autism and there was not enough time for them to get acquainted,” said his mother. If the scribe and student do not understand each other or if the scribe does not know the subject matter, the exam may not go well at all, irrespective of how well prepared the student is.
Experts say that while the School Education Department is sensitive to the needs of students with disabilities, more needs to be done to ensure that scribes are properly oriented and a pool needs to be created across curricula that can be called upon at any time.
Under the State Board system, the students with disabilities who are to write the Board examinations apply beforehand with their medical certificates declaring that they need a scribe. The school heads subsequently prepare a list of students who need scribes and then pass them on to the District Education Officer. Based on this, mostly teachers are appointed as scribes and are allotted to the students.
An orientation, however, should be conducted for the scribes, says Dipti Bhatia, deputy director, Vidya Sagar, an organisation that works with people with disabilities. “This is needed so that they can work with students who use augmentative and alternative forms of communication systems,” she said. A pool of scribes who can work with students with various disabilities, including communication difficulties, would be very useful, she said.
Such a scribe pool and the need for scribes to be familiar with the subject terminology are guidelines prescribed in a Government Order released in February last. But C. Govindakrishnan, founder, Nethrodaya, an organisation that works with visually impaired persons, said: “The order is not being implemented in letter and spirit. Even this year, a visually impaired student writing the commerce exam got a science teacher. We later got it changed.”
Other provisions such as the student and scribe practising working together prior to the exam and testing the legibility of handwriting during the training phase of scribes too, are not followed, he said. This year, 11 students from Nethrodaya are writing the class X and XII Board exams.
A former official with the Education Department said that while there was a training and orientation programme proposed for scribes a few years ago, it did not take shape.
The need for a scribe bank is not limited to school which follow the State Board system alone. Hema Sidi, Principal of Gowrin School in Chennai where the students take up the examination in the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) curriculum, said that they had to approach various schools in the city to get student scribes to help their students write the final exams.
“The rules specify that the scribes have to be two classes lower than the student. Initially, most of the schools in Chennai were getting assigned scribes, but now we are approaching schools in the city to ask them for student volunteers. While a few of them are cooperative, more institutions should join in and the students can be sensitised to the same,” she said.
