Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai

A result of improper evaluation?

By Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI May 21. Students of Class XII of the Chennai Corporation Girl's Higher Secondary School on Rotlers Street off Doveton have been living their worst nightmare since the announcement of the higher secondary results.

Twenty-four of the 28 students in the Telugu medium class have failed in history or economics, most of them securing single digit percentages. Even the four students, who passed, have just about managed to scrape past the pass mark.

The dismal scenario has come as a jolt to the school, which is the only Corporation-run institute imparting minority language education. ``Even during my final revision exams, I scored more than 120 out of 200 in both history and economics. But in my final, I have scored less than 10 per cent. It seems impossible,'' says one student.

Most students feel that the problem lies in evaluation of papers. But when they visited the Directorate of Government Examinations on Monday, they were met with a cold reception.

``The examinations department officials did not entertain our queries at all. They even said it would not be possible to get photocopies of our answersheets,'' says M. Selvi. She failed in economics with a score of 18 out of 200. During her last revision examination conducted by the Corporation School, she had scored 121 in the same subject.

An education department official at the Corporation said the problem could be that those who were not proficient in Telugu had corrected the answer sheets.

``The marks secured by the students are ridiculous. It is likely that the paper evaluators did not know the language and evaluated the paper based on some answer key. Last year the school registered a pass percentage of more than 90. So the present results come as a big shock,'' the official said.

The students appealed to the Corporation officials on Tuesday to sort out the evaluation problems if any. Since most of them come from economically backward sections of the society, they have asked the civic agency to pay the revaluation charges for the papers.

In fact, for the Corporation only this class has shown a sharp decline in pass percentage.

On an average, the 19 higher secondary schools run by the civic agency have secured a pass performance of 73 per cent.

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