21New Delhi, May 2: Fresh concerns have emerged over the errors in this year’s IIT Joint Entrance Examination even as the institutes today unveiled a set of corrective measures, apologising to students but ruling out a retest.
These concerns involve both new revelations challenging the IITs’ claims, and the inability of the institutes to address a key problem — that of the errors depriving the Hindi test takers of knowledge of the true weightage of several questions.
Stung by concern at the errors, and a slap on the wrist from human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, the IIT Joint Admission Board (JAB) today held an emergency meeting here.
The JAB — which consists of all the IIT directors and organising faculty — concluded that a set of corrective measures would adequately redress the concerns. (See chart)
“The IITs sincerely regret the hardships that the candidates may have faced during the examination,†a statement issued by the institutes said while adding: “The situation does not warrant the holding of any re-examination.â€
But the corrective measures outlined by the IITs have already triggered discontent both among students and other stakeholders.
An NGO that has filed a public interest litigation in Delhi High Court seeking a stay on the release of the IIT-JEE results said it would seek Rahul Gandhi’s intervention.
The IITs had dismissed as “immaterial†an error that related to a set of questions that had more than one correct answer. The instructions for these questions said students would receive partial marks for partially correct answers and full marks if they marked all the correct bubbles. The instructions added that there would be no negative marking for darkening an incorrect bubble for these questions, worth a hefty 93 marks.
These instructions led to the fear that a smart student could score full marks in this section by wholesale darkening of all four options, which would include the correct answers with no penalty for the incorrectly marked bubbles. The IITs had dismissed this concern by arguing that they could identify the students who attempted this tactic as such questions never have all four options correct.
But the 2008 question papers and the model answers for these released by the IITs show that some similar questions that year did have all four options correct. This revelation challenges the claim made by the institutes, since a student can now cite precedent to claim that he legitimately believed that all four answers were correct.
“If all four options can be correct, as the 2008 experience now shows, how can the IITs penalise a student for marking all four bubbles?†asked Rajeev Kumar, the computer science professor at IIT Kharagpur who first revealed the errors in the JEE papers this year.
The marking-scheme instructions in Hindi question papers allocated three marks each to six questions that actually carried eight marks each. This error triggered concerns that Hindi students may not have attempted these questions, or may have half-heartedly attempted them, having been misled about their true weightage while picking which questions to spend time on.
But in the corrective measure unveiled today, the IITs have merely agreed to evaluate these questions for eight marks instead of three. This will not assist those students who did not attempt these questions as seriously as they would have if they had known their true worth.
In cases where some questions were either missing or illegible, students’ performance in the remainder of the paper will be used to scale up their marks to compensate for these questions. But such a scenario presumes that students would have had a success rate in the missing questions identical to their performance in the remainder of the question paper.
If two students, one with missing questions and the other with the full paper, performed equally in the remainder of the paper, and both knew the answers to the missing questions, the student who could not attempt these questions will likely end up with a lower score for no fault of his.
