DGE recommends penalising 1,200 teachers

Chennai: The directorate of government examinations (DGE) has recommended penalising more than 1,200 teachers for blunders in the evaluation of answer scripts of classes 10, 11 and 12 this year. “Some of the answer scripts which sought for retotalling and revaluation had marks difference as many as 100 marks as examiners made errors in totalling the marks and entering them,” sources said.

In many answer scripts, questions and pages were mistakenly not evaluated by the examiners leading to marks variation up to 25 marks in key subjects after revaluation.

“Assistant examiners, scrutiny officers and chief examiners were asked to give their explanation for the errors in the evaluation. The action was recommended only against those teachers who did not evaluate the questions and wrongly entered the marks. These errors could have been avoided by verifying the answer sheets properly,” sources pointed out.

The DGE is conducting three board exams for classes 10, 11 and 12 from March 2018. Out of 16 lakh students who appeared for both plus-1 and plus-2 board exams, around 4,000 students sought revaluation. “Over 50 per cent of the answer scripts had change in their marks this year,” sources said.  

Around 16,000 teachers were involved in evaluating the plus-1 and plus-2 answer scripts and approximately 19,000 teachers were employed to evaluate the class 10 answer scripts.

Among them, the action would be initiated against more than 1,200 teachers. The school education department has forwarded the list of teachers to chief educational officers.

“We have received the list of teachers who have made errors in the evaluation. We will ask for their explanation and then decide about the kind of action initiated against them,” a chief educational officer told this paper.

The teachers are likely to face an increment cut. However, the teachers pointed out the lack of experience among the examiners from private schools and this year’s workload as the major reasons for the errors in evaluation.

“Due to inexperienced teachers sent by private schools for evaluation work, the government school teachers are overburdened. District officers who head the evaluation camp would urge the chief examiners and scrutiny officers also to evaluate the answer scripts to finish the process quickly,” said P.Manoharan, general secretary, Tamil Nadu Post Graduate Teachers Association.

Scrutiny officers and chief examiners are not supposed to evaluate the answer scripts. Their job is to look for errors in corrected answer scripts.
“The private schools which have nearly 50% of teachers in higher secondary do not send their experienced teachers to evaluation work as they would be engaged in taking classes for next batch of students,” he said.

While accepting that some teachers were also careless in their work he brought the attention on the poor remuneration for the evaluation work. 
“The school teacher is getting Rs.10 per answer sheet whereas the college teacher is getting Rs 25 per answer sheet. If the government increases the remuneration, then it can attract qualified teachers for evaluation,” he suggested.

Some teachers also pointed out the nonstop evaluation due to the newly introduced class 11 exams as one of the reasons for the errors. During April and May this year, the teachers had evaluated nearly 2 crore answer scripts of students from classes 10, 11 and 12.