THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A large number of students, who are concerned about scoring low marks in the Higher Secondary Plus-II English examination, are now pinning their hopes on the meeting of the higher secondary exam board scheduled to be held before the declaration of the results in May. They hope the exam board would adopt adequate measures to ensure that their overall score is not affected, as it could have an adverse impact on their higher education prospects.
Soon after the exam on March 25, students and teachers pointed out that the sudden change in the pattern of questions of the English paper posed difficulty to the candidates.
According to a source, the complaints were also raised at the scheme finalisation meeting held by the exam board before the evaluation of answer-scripts but none of them was addressed. “As many as 13 questions carrying 38 marks were lifted directly from a question bank for the Vocational Higher Secondary course. The question paper did not adhere to the pattern followed for Higher Secondary course.
The question pattern was also entirely different from that of the model exam,” said a higher secondary teacher.
There were also complaints from a section of teachers that the question paper was set even before preparing the pool of questions. “The Higher Secondary Exam Board has chosen to sidestep the complaints as accepting them would indirectly mean admitting to a lapse in the setting of question paper,” said a teachers’ association representative.
Meanwhile, the source said the exam board was adopting a ‘wait and watch’ approach to assess if the change in the question pattern would have an impact on the marks of the English paper for a large number of students. “If there is a considerable dip in the state average for the Part I English paper, corrective measures would have to be adopted to rectify it,” said an official.