By Ganesh Bhatt
New Delhi, Feb 26 (IANS) In the past few years, several incidents of question paper leaks, cheating in exams and their cancellation have come to light which simultaneously has raised questions on the country’s education system.
The Union Ministry of Education states that education is a subject of the Constitution’s Concurrent List and that schools, except the funded ones owned by the Central government, come under the jurisdiction of the state governments.
Thus, matters relating to examination in schools are regulated as per the rules and instructions of the respective examination boards of the concerned state government.
This, however, does not indicate that there is no relation between the Centre and the examination system. Many departments under the Ministry of Education conduct nationwide examinations, such as the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) which conducts Board and other examinations of 10th and 12th class students across the country.
The CBSE has maintained a record of not having any paper leaks since the past several years.
However, the Education Ministry had apprised that two cases of question paper leak, of Class 12th Economics and Class 10th Mathematics respectively, were reported in the 2018 Board exams, adding that the affiliation of both the schools found guilty in the matter was terminated with immediate effect following due process.
The Ministry of Education has said that apart from the aforementioned two incidents, no other incident of question paper leak has taken place in the last five years.
The Ministry added that the incidents occurred due to criminal misconduct of individual officers and did not affect the conduct of the examinations.
Significantly, no such incident has been seen in other examinations conducted by the CBSE such as Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET), Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Selection Test (JNVST), Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) exams and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Selection Test (JNVST).
In the matter of Class 12 Economics question paper leak, the Board had informed the concerned state police, who had arrested the Centre Superintendent of DAV Centenary Public school located in Himachal Pradesh’s Una, along with his two colleagues and the Manager of the Custodian Bank where the question papers were stored.
Similarly, the principal and two teachers of Delhi’s Mother Khazani Convent School and owner of one 2-G Coaching Institute were arrested for the Class 10 Mathematics question paper leak.
The government has also been focusing on maintaining the integrity of important nationwide examinations like National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).
The Centre has established the National Testing Agency (NTA) as an autonomous and self-sustaining premier testing organisation to conduct entrance examinations for higher educational institutions in the country.
As per the records of NTA, no case of question paper leak of NEET (UG) and JEE (Main) has been reported so far.
–IANS
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