Bihar: 5,000 Matric pupils sans marksheets

PATNA: The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has once again hogged the limelight for all the wrong reasons.
At least 5,000 Matric students of more than 40 schools in the state have allegedly not received their original marksheets and provisional certificates yet. They are now busy making rounds of their respective schools, district education offices and the BSEB headquarters.
Bapu Smarak Mahila Uchh Vidyalaya-Rajendra Nagar is one of the schools that did not receive its students’ marksheets, cross lists and provisional certificates. “We have written a letter to the BSEB as well as the district education officer (DEO) in this regard,” school principal Minakshi Jha told this newspaper on Thursday.
The state examination board started providing Matric marksheets to different district education offices from May 1. The schools, on the other hand, got the documents from May 2 to 6. Results were announced by the BSEB on April 6.
BSEB officials claimed that results of the 5,000 students had been upheld due to non-payment of examination fees.
Dismissing the BSEB’s claim, Bihar Secondary School Teachers’ Association (BSSTA) general secretary Shatrughan Prasad Singh said, “In case of non-payment of fees, students would not have been allowed to appear for exams as per the BSEB’s rule. The board has committed mistakes in the tabulation of marks and is making lame excuses to hide them.”
BSSTA spokesperson Abhishek Kumar told this reporter that they had been receiving many such complaints from different districts.
Many schools also reported that the marks of objective-type questions and practical exams were missing from the cross list issued to them by the board. A cross list contains separate marks of all the exams — practical, objective and subjective — as well as the details of students.
According to Mehus High School’s (Sheikhpura) officiating principal Mukesh Kumar, at least 200 students have not received the marks of the objective papers. “All the subjects have 50% objective-type questions and 50% subjective ones. When we went through the cross list of 419 Matric students, we saw that 200 of them had got zero in the objective papers,” he said.
Mukesh wrote a letter to the DEO concerned on May 6 and another one to the BSEB on May 7, pointing out the anomalies. “We have not received any reply from the board officials yet,” he said.
Krishna Kumari Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School’s (Hajipur) principal K C Ray pointed out that the students of his institute had not got practical marks in the social studies paper.
According to a press release issued by the BSEB, the board has rectified the errors issued in the cross lists and marksheets of all the students of the Sheikhpura school. “The school will get the new marksheets within three days,” it stated.