The Karnataka School Examination and Assessment Board (KSEAB) on Sunday, March 10, issued a circular saying that the students who appeared for the II Pre-University College (PUC) Board examination for physics on March 7 will be awarded grace marks after requests from majority of the students.
A few questions in the paper appeared from the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) section of the textbook, which are usually tough and not taught by teachers, stated a report by The New Indian Express.
This notification comes after the students of II PU Science started an online petition on change.org demanding that KSEAB give them grace marks for the difficult and tricky mutliple-choice questions (MCQs). However, the board also warned that this is only a one-off resolution and will not be entertained in the future.
The online petition received over 70,054 signatures in no time, compelling the authorities to act.
The exact problem
The students opined that though the numerical problems were simple and to the point, the MCQs were not part of the syllabus and very difficult to crack.
"Please don't try to build a castle in the air by saying the board will conduct 3 exams a year. You can attend the next one. We cannot write another exam while competitive exams are being conducted parallelly. The board had clearly mentioned that the questions should not be ambiguous. But the board itself disregarded its own guidelines,” read the petition.
A student from Bengaluru said that he has been working very hard for the past two years to score well in the boards that will help him get a good Karnataka Common Entrance Test (KCET) score, but the problems were not solvable and some were from the deleted portions of the syllabus.
“The questions that appeared in MCQ were part of the Joint Entrance Examination/National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (JEE/NEET) entrance. Maybe students who go for coaching would have been able to solve those MCQs but what about people who never attended any coaching class and depended only on handbooks and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Every single mark will decide our future,” wrote Nisha Mary from Bengaluru.
Board gives in
The board decided to award grace marks to all students who attempted non-blueprint MCQs in Part A of the paper. Students who skipped the questions will not be given any grace marks, it was strictly noted.
“Please note that such action cannot be taken again for any other subjects as students have to study the entire textbooks. The questions are formulated based on the NCERT textbook,” warned the circular, as stated in a report by The New Indian Express.
