The state higher secondary council president said on Monday that paper-setters had been asked to set “easy questions” this year as the examinees were writing the first board exams of their life.
The students writing this year’s school-leaving exams could not take the Class X boards in 2021 because of the Covid pandemic.
“As questions were easy, we did not receive any complaints (from the examinees),” council president Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya said after the HS 2023 ended.
Last year, when the HS examinees had written their papers at their respective schools (home centres), the council made “special considerations” for evaluation of the answerscripts.
This year, the examinees had to write the papers at away centres.
Asked whether the council would tweak evaluation norms considering that this batch had not written any board exams before HS, Bhattacharya said: “We told the paper-setters at a meeting not to set difficult questions. They were told to set easy questions keeping in view that these students did not write Madhyamik because of the pandemic. So, we did not receive any complaints about questions. The questions were fine.
“We hope the students did not encounter any difficulty while writing answers. We don’t see any need for giving special instruction (for evaluation).”
In 2021, Madhyamik and the HS could not be held because of a fresh and sharp rise in Covid cases.
Last year, 88.44 per cent of the candidates passed the HS exams, the results of which were declared on June 9.
Since then, there had been protests by unsuccessful candidates in many places, including in front of the state education department headquarters in Salt Lake.
The council later decided to allow reviews in all HS papers.
“Perhaps, the council set easy questions this year to avoid the situation we saw last year. But this kind of populist approach comes in the way of evaluation of merit,” said Saugata Basu, secretary of the government school teachers’ association.
This year over 8 lakh candidates wrote the HS at 2,349 venues.
Council president Bhattacharya said they were likely to publish results before June 10.
“We have plans to introduce artificial intelligence and machine learning in the Class XI curriculum in the next academic year. We are awaiting the government’s approval,” he said.