The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) continues to grab the headlines, and as usual for all the wrong reasons.
After being under the scanner for incidents of brazen cheating in exams and ‘fake’ toppers, the board this time failed a Class X student in two subjects. However, the girl insisted she had had much better and dragged the board to the court, got her copies rechecked and passed with good marks.
The court even ordered the BSEB to pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to Priyanka from north Bihar’s Saharsa district for the negligence.
During the investigation, it was also found that the student’s answer-scripts were mixed up with someone else’s papers, leading to her poor marks.
Priyanka from Saharsa was distraught when she got poor marks in two subjects in the Board exams – nine out of 100 in Sanskrit and 29 from a total of 80 in the science theory exam.
Priyanka, student of government-run DD High School, figured that there had been a mistake and quickly applied for revaluation. But she was in for a shock when the revaluation result came in.
While her marks in Sanskrit rose from 4 to 9, her score in the Science paper dropped from 29 to 7. Left with no option, she then approached the Patna High Court.
To ensure that this was not a frivolous case, the high court ordered Priyanka to pay Rs 40,000 as deposit. The court also warned her that she will lose the deposited money if it turns out to be a fake case.
The court ordered the board to produce Priyanka’s answer-scripts. However, the hand-writing on the papers did not match with that of Priyanka’s. The court then ordered the board to trace the original papers written by Priyanka.
Once this was done, the BSEB admitted the mistake, got her copies rechecked and revised the marks – 80 in Sanskrit and 61 in the theory exam for Science.
Priyanka won the court battle, but it was too late for her as enrolments in most institutions for the higher secondary course are over by now.
The goof-up by the BSEB comes a year after the state board Class XII Arts topper Ruby Rai was arrested by the SIT team in Patna. Rai came to limelight when a video of her, in which she described political science as a subject that deals with cooking, went viral. Earlier this year, Class XII Arts topper Ganesh Kumar was arrested on charge of forgery of documents.
In 2015, the photo of parents climbing atop a school building to supply answer sheets to help students taking the exam had gone viral.
