Now, Jumbled Questions in Plus-2 Exams
COIMBATORE : The Directorate of Government Examinations has re-introduced the ‘jumbled question’ method in this year’s plus-two examinations. In this method, the order in which these multiple choice questions appear will be shuffled to prevent students copying from each other.
In previous examinations, there were 40 multiple choice questions worth one mark each, in the six papers that the plus-two students wrote including Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, Mathematics and Biology. In the remaining five examinations there were 30 questions worth one-mark each. Without jumbling the order of the questions students would resort to asking their neighbours what responses they had made, or by surreptitiously seeing the responses made by fellow students sitting next to them.
With the current system, there are two sets of question papers - namely ‘A’ and ‘B’- with the same set of questions but the order in which these questions are printed is different.
“The questions are printed in different orders and distributed to the students in the exam halls so that the students can’t ask for answers from the neighbouring candidates by showing ‘symbols’,” said Education Department officials.
The Directorate re-introduced this method as it received a number of complaints from certain districts in Tamil Nadu of students copying responses made by other students in the science and mathematics examinations.
The Joint Director (Higher Secondary), V.Rajarajeswari has released a circular stating that the ‘jumping method’ will also be implemented for this year’s supplementary examinations for Higher Secondary Certificate students to be held later this September. The Directorate has passed instructions to the Exam Control Cells, Chief Educational Officers, and supervisors in exam centres in all the districts to take necessary steps to ensure implementation of the new system.
It is worth noting that new methods were introduced by the Directorate of Government Examinations that attempted to assign student roll numbers specific barcodes in answer sheets for which special question papers and answer sheets were handed out. However, this method was scrapped last year as it created further confusion as coordinating the correct answer keys to the evaluators turned out to be a logistical nightmare.