The details of marks that the West Bengal Board of Primary Education uploaded late on Monday for those who were appointed as primary school teachers show that several of them were marked erroneously while factoring in the weightage of their higher secondary examination score.
A teaching job aspirant who has qualified Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) can score a maximum of 10 based on performance in the HS examination.
The details show that some candidates have got more than 10, forcing the board to order a probe to find out how the anomalies took place.
The board on Monday uploaded with the details of marks of the 2014 TET candidates who later got appointed as teachers in 2016 and 2020 following a court order.
A board official said the board recommends a candidate for being appointed as a teacher based on the scores in TET, interview, Madhyamik, higher secondary and other parameters.
The controversy erupted when it emerged in the score details that some candidates got more than 10 marks in HS.
The Telegraph is in possession of a document that says that a candidate has scored 10.96 in HS.
A board official said that a candidate can score a maximum of 10 marks only if he or she gets 500 out of 500 in HS.
“Some mistakes have happened. It has come to the attention of the board. It has been sent to our confidential section to find out what has happened. The board will take appropriate measures,” said Partha Karmakar, the deputy secretary (academic) of the board.
Another board official said, considering that the TET was held in 2014, there was no record of any candidate scoring 500 out of 500 before that year.
The West Bengal higher secondary council, which was once notoriously stingy with marks, had awarded 499 out of 500 to at least four students in the 2020 exams.
“Never before did an HS student score more than 99.8 per cent,” Mahua Das, then president of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education had said then.
“We have reports that the details of marks contains statistics showing some have got 10 marks in HS. It was not possible for a candidate who had written TET in 2014 to get 500 out of 500 in HS. We have to find out how this happened,” said a board official.
The anomaly in the marks came to the fore a day after the state primary education board constituted a committee to find out whether the question paper of the diploma in elementary education (DElEd) was leaked on Monday.