Prof. S. S. Verma
Paper setting and evaluation at every level of education whether for each class or each school/college/university or for common examinations or tests at district/state/national level is an integral part of our education system and hope that it will still remain so in the times to come. Question paper and its evaluation have been and will remain an integral part of education whether for continuous evaluation system or for semester/year end examination system all over the world to rank students with their performance towards learning and to qualify their entry to some professional course.
Recently, question papers of English, Physics and Mathematics setup by educational experts of CBSE, New Delhi for class XIIth students appearing all over the country are under debate for their level of toughness and lengthy contents. Such news always appear in the media concerning to various boards, colleges and universities. Such endeavors (i.e., paper settings and evaluation) become more important when students taking common examinations have to be rated with different educational backgrounds and educational boards setting different question papers and being evaluated by different people all over the country. In India, where there are number of education boards, dealing independently with question settings and their evaluations and then students competing for common entrances like JEE (Main) where board examination marks play a great role, in spite of the moderation formulae designed by CBSE, New Delhi, injustice faced by students from different walks cannot be over ruled.
Paper setting for national level tests (subjective or objective) is a great art and many Ph.D. thesis, & research papers have been written on the topic along with various administrative and educational policies being framed on the issue of paper settings and their evaluation. Above all these, this task is still being carried out by human and is a person specific. Paper setters and evaluators, sometimes forget that they are dealing with educational life and career of students who have burned their mid night oil in the preparation for these examinations. They go for very lengthy and difficult paper settings and strict evaluation for which they have all the explanations like to curb copying in examinations, bring out only the genuinely intelligent students but forget that they are forcing many of the students towards mental depression. Later on, due to public outcry, governing bodies of these examinations generally go ahead with making committees to suggest means and modes for providing relief to suffering students which generally come out either without any conclusions or too late and too less.
It is better to take pre-examination precautions in order to avoid post examination chaos. It is important at the first hand itself that paper setters and evaluators with qualities like unquestionable integrity, with vast educational experience of those subjects at the required level of schooling, genuinely & moderately authoritarian and with rational thinking should be selected. Moreover, papers should be drawn from 2-3 paper setters and then a committee constituting educationists with above mentioned qualities should decide on the final form of question paper. Guidelines for paper setters and line-wise evaluation criteria should be provided to evaluators with centralized paper checking with one question or part of it per evaluator. Question paper setter and evaluator should fulfill their assignment with great honesty, dedication, integrity, seriousness and moderate feelings.
Before setting a question paper, each paper setter should put himself in the shoes of the examinee and then frame the type, level and duration of the questions. Toughness level of question paper should be such that 50% of it can be attempted by even an average student, next 20% by good students and rest 30% by intelligent students. The length of questions should be strictly such that it must be solved by an intelligent student even 10-15 minutes before the total time allowed for examination. Further, strict rules should be framed for evaluation of question papers at every level and there should be counter checks for question paper setting and evaluation.
Question paper setter and evaluator should fulfill their assignment with great honesty, dedication, integrity, seriousness and moderate feelings. In any case, they should not challenge the existence of the examinee; rather they should motivate and help the examinee to express him so that students do not lose the faith in examination system in particular and education system in general. Though the seriousness of these things discussed become immaterial with respect to the population in the country going for education but still it is great challenge to our education system, its planners and pillars (teachers) to pay attention so that things do not go haywire.
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