Hisar, May 8
The failure rate among government school students in Haryana, especially for classes for which examinations are conducted in house, has suddenly dipped, thanks to the fudging of results by teachers who fear retrenchment if the enrolment goes down.
Inquiries reveal that most government schools, particularly those located in the rural areas, have produced a pass percentage of 90 and above in the recent in-house examinations. In many cases, none of the students has failed. As a result, the strength of students in government schools in the villages has not fallen, which could have necessitated the retrenchment or reshuffling of teachers.
It is learnt that teachers encouraged students to use unfair means in several ways. Since students of lower classes found it hard to copy from books, teachers are reported to have either dictated the answers in examination halls or wrote these down on blackboards to let them copy from there. In other cases, teachers asked students to attempt any question they could several times over to fill the answer sheets. Pass marks were awarded to such students as the answer sheets were checked by teachers themselves.
The teachers were so desperate to produce good results that even those who had scored a few marks were given grace marks twice or thrice the number of marks scored to help them make the grade. No wonder a majority of the students of these schools have obtained merely pass marks, which indicates fudging of results.
Even in examinations conducted by the school education board, leaders of teachers’
organisations visited the spot marking centres to request their colleagues to be extremely lenient in marking answer books in the interest of the teaching community in the state. Some teachers who refused to help students copy were told to perform other duties to enable others to ensure a high pass percentage.
Since the hierarchy is such that teachers are designated according to the classes they teach, they are interested only in ensuring good results in their own category. For instance, they are least bothered if the students promoted through fudging fail in higher classes since bad results would then affect lecturers and senior masters and mistresses.
