The Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) will print five papers of every subject with a different sequence of short questions in a bid avoid use of unfair means in during the annual examinations of the Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) in 2012.
Official sources told Pakistan Today that the board management is taking this step after the successful experiment of papers carrying different sequences of multiple choice questions (MCQs) in the exams last year.
“The questions would be same for all students, but the order of questions would be changed so that students are unable to match answers during exams,” said BIEK Chairman Anwar Ahmed Zai
“Earlier, the board had printed five papers with change MCQs question orders and that helped the board management to curb cheating during exams. This time, the board has principally agreed to take this decision to improve the standard of exams.”
To improve the quality of exams, BIEK has already divided each paper into three parts, MCQs, short questions and descriptive questions. To create balance in theory and practical marks and to emphasise on the theory section, the board has lowered the marks of practical exam from 25 to 15.
To a question about the Cambridge International Examination (CIE) system and e-marking, he replied that the Inter-Board Committee Chairmen (IBCC) had visited Cambridge to review the examination process and found a number of discrepancies. After witnessing these flaws, the IBCC has refused percentage uniform marks (PUMs) of the CIE System for equivalence and told the authorities concerned again to print actual raw marks on certificates instead of standardised PUMs.
“The IBCC committee representatives checked a raw marks certificate of a student, who was awarded with 67 percent, but the CIE awarded him with an A grade and the student got an equivalence of 85 percent from BIEK as per PUMs.
Commenting on the e-marking system of examinations, he said it could be implemented in boards where a small number of students appear in exams.
Citing the Aga Khan Board’s example, he said, “This system was adopted by the Aga Khan Board, which has 180 affiliated institutes with 8,000 registered students. They successfully organised exam under modern digital system, but it could not be applied in BIEK because the board organises exam for 1,100,000 students every year.”
Zai said that the Punjab government had decided to adopt e-marking system and eight boards with total student strength of 24,00,000 had experimented with that in the last annual exams, but they failed to implement the digital system and the result could not be announced as per the given schedule. “Besides, the students, who appear in local boards exams every year, could not bear the burden of heavy examination fee as the e-marking exam system was too costly as compared to the manual system,” he added.
