40% More Evaluators Will Be Added In CBSE Board To Make Sure Error-Free Paper Checking

This year, more than 30 lakh students are writing their board exams. In a bid to make sure error-free evaluation, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has raised the number of evaluation centers across various regions by around 35%-40%. This initiative will subsequently have an increase in the number of evaluators this year.

Sanyam Bhardwaj, Controller of Examinations, CBSE said that the move will bring respite to evaluators who are sometimes overburdened with the sheer scale of the copies which needs to be evaluated. Sometimes, commuting to distantly located evaluation centers also becomes taxing for the evaluators, most of them being females. In addition, they face a crisis of teachers as many drops out in the last minute. This puts additional pressure on the remaining evaluators. She added that they hope to resolve the problem to some extent, by setting up more evaluation centers across regions.

She also said that this year, the CBSE has allocated more resources towards the evaluation process. This has been designed in such a way that re-checking would be a part of the initial evaluation itself. This will significantly bring down the number of mistakes. The governing body has been conducting a wide range of workshops across all regional centers for training evaluators to minimize errors.

A short-movie and presentations were shown to the teachers and evaluators, in the workshop, just to make them understand completely the common mistakes made while correcting the answer sheets. On the basis of the previous experience, the updated guidelines on the marking scheme have been shared with the evaluators. They are also planning to conduct dummy evaluations to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

As the dummy copy for the evaluation was the same; the variation in the scores was assessed. It was also a peer-learning experience. According to Bhardwaj, some of the most common mistakes in the evaluation include calculation mistakes while totaling or feeding wrong marks in the system and sometimes skipping over answers. He also added that the issue of overlooking the answers is major because students sometimes tend to answer a question across two different sets of answer sheets. To avoid such incidents, the students are advised to finish a particular answer on the same sheet.
The CBSE will also provide special consideration to 'creative answers' by the students, this year. As per his advice, the students are not just learning in the classroom or from the textbooks. They are also relying on and getting influenced by e-learning and webinars. This may help them in writing innovative answers, which might not be the same as per classroom teaching. Therefore, there is no one way of answering a question. So, teachers and evaluators have been instructed to not to deduct marks if the question has not been attempted in a conventional way. It will also provide help to students in moving away from rote learning and getting involved more in experiential learning and innovative methods.

By: Preeti Narula

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