30-mark calculation error `fails’ Gujarat Class 10 student, over 4K teacher penalised as mistakes galore in board exams

Putting academic career of a student at risk, a mathematics teacher in Gujarat wrongly calculated marks leading to his failure in Class X board examination by 30 marks.

The miscalculation was discovered when the student applied for a re-evaluation of his paper. This was not an isolated case as during evaluation exercise, the Gujarat State Education Board (GSEB) found many such errors during calculation of marks for Class 10 and 12 examinations. The GSEB imposed a fine of Rs 64 lakh on 4,488 teachers after these errors were detected, said a report in The Times of India.

President of the Gujarat Higher Secondary Teachers’ Association Bharat Patel was quoted by the newspaper saying “In all, 1,654 teachers who worked as paper checkers for class 10 have been fined Rs 20 lakh collectively for errors.” Patel stated that teachers were fined Rs 100 for each marking error. In total, 1,404 paper checkers for the class 12 general stream were fined Rs 24.31 lakh, while 1,430 checkers for the class 12 science stream were also fined.

According to board officials many of the roughly 100 teachers who made errors worth 10 marks or more were mathematics teachers. These errors were discovered when students looking to better their scorers in mathematics and science, sought the reassessment of their papers