BENGALURU: The Karnataka School Examination and Assessment Board (KSEAB) on Sunday issued a circular that the students who appeared for the II PU physics board examination on March 7, will be awarded grace marks after a request from the majority of the students. This notification comes after the II PU science students started an online petition on change.org demanding KSEAB give them grace marks for the difficult and tricky MCQs. However, the board also warned that this is only a one-off resolution and will not be entertained in the future. Students said that some questions in the paper appeared from the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) section of the textbook, which are usually tough and not taught by teachers.
The online petition received over 70,054 signatures in no time, compelling the authorities to act. The students opined that though the numerical problems were simple and to the point, the MCQs were not part of the syllabus, and were very difficult to crack. “...Please don’t try to build castle in the air by saying the board will conduct 3 exams a year. You can attend the next one. We cannot write another exam while competitive exams are being conducted parallelly. The board had clearly mentioned that the questions should not be ambiguous. But the board itself disregarded its guidelines...,” read the petition.
A student from Bengaluru said that he has been working very hard for the past two years to score well on the boards, which would help him get a good Karnataka Common Entrance Test (KCET) score, but the problems were not solvable, and some were from the deleted parts of the syllabus.
“The questions that appeared in MCQ were part of the JEE/NEET entrance. Maybe students who go for coaching would have been able to solve them, but what about people who never attended any coaching class and depend only on handbooks and NCERT? Every single mark will decide our future,” wrote Nisha Mary, a student from Bengaluru.
The board decided to award grace marks to all students who attempted non-blueprint MCQs in Part A of the paper, However that board also noted that the students who skipped the questions, will not be given any grace marks.