view in one page and print
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100425/jsp/frontpage/story_12378452.jsp
Sunday, April 25, 2010
CHARU SUDAN KASTURI
New Delhi, April 24: The IITs have admitted that their Joint Entrance Examination this year carried misleading instructions for some students. The admission came in a report to the human resource development ministry, which is now mulling corrective measures to counter criticism.
HRD minister Kapil Sibal had asked for the report after Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar wrote to him demanding that the JEE be conducted again to ensure fair opportunities to all students, top sources told The Telegraph.
Sibal may meet the directors of the IITs in Delhi soon to evolve a strategy to convince students that they will be marked fairly despite the errors, which the institutes have so far underplayed, the sources said.
The report to Sibal sent by IIT Madras, the institute that organised the JEE this year, does not itself suggest solutions to compensate for any disadvantage to students who received erroneous instructions, the sources said.
But the sources insisted that conducting the JEE again — as demanded by the Bihar chief minister — was an extremely unlikely option for the government to take.
“We haven’t yet figured out how to resolve the concerns, and a meeting involving the minister is possible. But holding the JEE again this year is highly unlikely,” a source said.
Over 4.5 lakh students appeared for the JEE this year on April 11. But the question papers carried a series of errors, mostly in the instructions informing students how they would be marked.
The Optical Mark Reader answer sheets wrongly advised students to fill bubbles corresponding to math questions where they should have answered physics questions, and indicated physics where math answers had to be marked.
Although the error was announced in all examination centres after it was spotted, several students had by then already filled several bubbles. Although the bubbles are to be filled with pencil, erasing marks is not advisable as traces of marking on more than one bubble can confuse the reader.
IIT officials are, however, convinced that they can rectify the impact of this error on students.
But concerns remain among IIT administrators over two other errors that appear to adversely impact only those students who took the test in Hindi.
Section four of the question paper offered eight marks for each completely correct answer. But the instructions on the Hindi papers said that these same questions would earn students only three marks — instead of eight — for completely accurate answers.
The incorrect information misled students who took the test in Hindi about the true weightage of the questions and many students may have opted to instead attempt questions offering higher marks.
A partial saving grace that the IITs can use in their favour is that these questions did not carry negative marking and so even students who received incorrect information may have attempted the questions.
But the incorrect low marking for these questions, combined with the constraints of time, could have made at least some students either ignore these questions, or mark answers randomly, spending more time on questions carrying larger weightage.
An entire question was missing from one set of question papers in Hindi, the third error pointed out by Nitish in his letter to Sibal last week.
____________________________________________________________________________
Leave a comment
(if you having troubles, try posting your comment on this page or send an email to chronicle @ itbhuglobal.org)Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi 221005, UP