Telangana to test Inter, SSC students

Hyderabad: While it is anybody’s guess whether the state will be divided or not before the Inter and SSC public exams in March 2014, the bifurcation issue has already started having an impact on exams.

The Board of Intermediate Education and the SSC Board are under tremendous pressure from junior lecturers and teachers, who are divided along regional lines, not to send answer scripts of one region to the other for evaluation from this year.

Till now, the Boards had been sending answer scripts of the Telangana region to Seemandhra and vice versa for evaluation to ensure that there is no favoritism in awarding marks. However, with regional feelings running high, the teachers want answer scripts to be evaluated in the same region.

There are indications that even after the bifurcation, both the Boards will continue to function as before and conduct exams uniformly for a certain period with the same syllabus and question papers to ensure that students do not have any problems.

“Emotions are running high over the bifurcation of the state. Teachers and lecturers are actively taking part in movements for and against bifurcation. There are indications that the state may be bifurcated by January 2014, just before the exams in March. Even after bifurcation, students in both the regions will have to take the exams with the same syllabus and same question papers as there would not be sufficient time to change the existing pattern even if the new governments wanted to do so.

“If answer scripts are swapped among regions for evaluation, it will give unnecessary scope for suspicions and controversies among students, parents, teachers and college managements. This can be avoided by conducting evaluations within the same region,” said Dr P. Madhusudhan Reddy, the general secretary, of the AP Government Junior Lecturers’ Association.

Inter marks have become more significant since last year with the Centre’s policy to give 40 per cent weightage for them in JEE (Main). Moreover, only students who come within the top-20 percentile in Inter exams are eligible for admission to IITs, even after clearing JEE (Main) and JEE (Advanced). with top marks and ranks.

Besides, the state government has been giving 25 per cent weightage for Inter marks in Eamcet since 2009.

All these factors have put enormous pressure on the evaluators to make error-free evaluations of answer scripts. Thousands of students have been applying for photocopies of answer scripts after the announcement of results to verify whether there were any evaluation errors or not. The strong emotions over the bifurcation issue has thus further added pressure on the evaluators.