CBSE retest won’t have any impact, results to be out by May end

NEWDELHI: The class 12 Economics retest, that took place on April 25 in which around five lakh students appeared, will not have any impact on the result declaration date in the last week of May, Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) officials said.

The board exams were marred in controversy this year with the Class 10 Mathematics paper and Class 12 Economics paper being leaked. The board then decided to conduct a retest for the Economics paper on April 25.

“The retest was taken by a huge number of students but that will not cause any delay in the results as we already have all arrangements in place to prepare the result on time. The Class 12 results will be announced in May last week but a date is yet to be finalised,” a CBSE official said.

Another official said this year the board had engaged more evaluators to check the answersheets because the original plan was to declare results early. “We tightened the evaluation process. Of course checking around five lakh copies is a huge task. So, having a higher number of evaluators will help,” the official said.

Around 28 lakh candidates had registered to appear for the CBSE Class 10 and 12 examinations.

A total of 16,38,428 candidates had registered for the Class 10 examination conducted at 4,453 centres across India and 78 centres outside India. For the Class 12 exam, 11,86,306 candidates had registered and the exams were held at 4,138 centres in India and 71 centres abroad.

After the leak, the CBSE started a new system of delivering exam papers, under which officials delivered them to the school. Earlier exam in-charge used to visit a bank to collect the question papers. The school van accident at an unmanned railway crossing in Kushinagar district of Uttar Pradesh last Thursday is a chilling replay of a similar incident on July 25, 2016, at Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh. In both the cases, reckless drivers drove the young school children to death.

Reports of both the incidents reveal that a ‘Railway Mitra’, a volunteer posted at such crossings to warn motorists of an approaching train, waved a red flag and urged the driver not to proceed. The children in the vehicle, sensing the danger, begged the driver to stop, but to no avail. With headphones on, the driver drove at full speed and put the vehicle in the path of the speeding train. While in the Kushinagar tragedy on Thursday, 13 children died and seven were injured, in the Bhadohi mishap in 2016, seven children died and 14 were injured. If only the driver had learnt some safety lessons from the previous tragedy, those 13 children would be alive today.

Reckless driving, overloading