The Hindu : Printing errors plague entrance exams

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 26, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Kerala

Printing errors plague entrance exams

By G. Mahadevan

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM April 25. Error-filled question papers continue to be the bane of this year's entrance examinations for admission to professional colleges in the State.

After the mix-up in the versions of question papers of the Mathematics paper which subsequently got cancelled, many question papers of the Physics and Chemistry paper of the medical entrance held on Thursday too reportedly had errors in them.

The question papers either had a set of questions missing or had a set of questions getting repeated. In the version A3 of the Chemistry paper for instance, questions 45 to 79 were missing. In another version of the question paper, questions 31 onwards were repeated more than twice. As of today, four students have come forward with reports of such faulty question booklets and two of them have already petitioned the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations on the matter.

However, the travails of the students writing the entrance examination did not end with getting a faulty question booklet.

In two examination centres in Thiruvananthapuram — St. Mary's high school Pattom and the Cotton Hill Girls' High School — the invigilators took 15 to 20 minutes to fetch a fresh, fault-free booklet for the candidates.

According to Nisha who wrote the entrance examination at the Cotton Hill School, the fresh question booklet was given 20 minutes after she had pointed out the errors in the question booklet to the invigilator. The case of Lakshmi who wrote the examination at the St. Mary's school was no different.

After the student pointed out that her question paper had a chunk of questions missing, it took the authorities 15 minutes to get the booklet replaced. In the case of the two other students also, there was a delay in getting the fresh question booklets.

None of these students was given any extra time to finish their examinations and, therefore, were unable to attempt at least 10 to 15 questions.

It has been pointed out that even though the authorities say they take every effort to maintain the secrecy and accuracy of the question papers, this year's entrance examination has been full of such `mix-ups'.

It has been suggested that it is the very steps which are being taken in the name of secrecy that prevent authorities from detecting such mistakes in the question papers.

The professor at the Department of Zoology, University of Kerala, and one who has sat on many a committee to evaluate the answer keys in the entrance examinations, Ommen V. Ommen, says that such mix-ups had severely eroded the credibility of the entrance examination and that the students have been put through unnecessary strain because of all this.

"The question papers can very well be printed here in complete secrecy. The CEE can have his own press. There should be a person to check for such kind of clerical mistakes. Anyway who is going to remember 120 questions per paper and all their answers. Moreover, this shows that the invigilators had no stand-by mechanism for such exigencies,'' he said.

The CEE was not available for comments.

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