KARACHI: Karachi’s Board of Secondary Education Chairman Professor Dr Saeeduddin on Sunday said that the Board has started working on an aggressive strategy equipped with new gadgets and tactics to counter copy culture and the mafia behind it, from the metropolis.
He alerted the cheaters and their facilitators of very strict systematic and administrative checks by the board under its very calculated and scientific strategy for next annual examinations of ninth and tenth classes. “There will be zero tolerance for the cheating and tampering with the results,” he said.
Talking to APP here, the BSEK chairman asserted that instead of relying on the use of unfair means, students and the teachers must utilise their energy, time and skills for the best preparation of the examinations.
“We have planned detailed meetings with the private and government schools’ heads to inform them that the BSEK will take stern actions against those involved in cheating,” he said.
Professor Dr Saeeduddin had served on senior positions in the Education Department before taking the responsibility as the BSEK chairman in the second half of last year with a strong commitment to establishing fair examination system.
He appealed to all sections of the society especially political and religious leaders to play their role in weeding out the copy culture, which has eroded and badly damaged the nation in the face of tough global competition and fast evolution of new disciplines/fields.
“Ulema can contribute a lot by telling the people around them that cheating in exams and tampering with the results is a serious crime. All this is against the spirit of Islam which guarantees social and economic justice to all,” he pleaded.
Speaking of some major corrective measures being introduced by the board, the BSEK chairman said the number of examinations centres would be reduced to one hundred and fifty against 392 centres in the past; most of these did not meet the defined criterion and environment.
He said that at least three months before the examinations, a final list of the exam centres would be displayed at the board office along with uploading on its website. For this purpose, the board teams would soon start visiting the government and private schools in the city to compile details /data to determine their fitness as the centres.
The BSEK chairman said that he would soon have a meeting with the Sindh Education Department’s Private Schools director to convince him that the private schools, especially for senior classes, must be bound to have a proper location, big building, required logistics and environment so that they could serve as better examination centres.
He said that the board had also improved the assessment/marking procedures to ensure transparency and authenticity of the results and for their earliest possible announcement.
The board had received around 1, 60,000 answer copies and the secret coding process would be completed this month. After that, he said, the copies would be handed over to three assessment centres set up by the board at different secret places in the city.
For ten assessors/examiners, one deputy head assessor would be appointed who would see the marking done by his juniors. Then, the head assessor would counter check the marking.
For the first time, the board had appointed the deputy heads and head checkers over the checkers, the BSEK chairman said.
When the copies would return to the board office, the marks awarded by the assessors would be re-counted by all these checkers placed in the above three categories so that there was no chance of mistake in the totalling.
The board had also made marks and other related data entry process more accurate. Now, the feeding of the data would be double checked by senior officials to ensure the accuracy of their juniors’ work.
By adopting this new technique, BSEK would have very nominal scrutiny cases to deal with, in future, Dr Saeeduddin concluded.