Students with special needs suffer in exams as scribes lack basic knowledge of subject
According to the guidelines issued by the Tamil Nadu government in 2021, the scribe assigned should be one step below the qualification of the candidate taking the examination
Students with special needs writing public examinations are having a hard time as the scribes assigned do not have basic knowledge of the subject.
According to the guidelines issued by the Tamil Nadu government in 2021, the scribe should be one step below the qualification of the candidate taking the examination.
“These scribes do not have any idea of the subject or know the importance of public examinations which oftentimes prove disastrous for the differently abled students as they lose marks,” said Aranga Raja, a member of the College Students’ and Graduates’ Association for the Blind.
He also drew attention to the fact that most times the assigned scribes are also old, leaving the students in a tight spot, as they do not write fast.
“The issue also persists when it comes to language, as phonetics differs from writing a word. The scribes end up writing an entirely different answer,” Mr. Raja added.
The issue, however, is different for those with autism as they require a scribe who is already familiar to them. “When this is not arranged for, they might be unable to perform in the exam,” said Smitha Sadasivan, Disability Rights Alliance.
Though it is prescribed in the 2015 guidelines that a pool of scribes should be maintained by the State, Raghuraman Kalyanraman, assistant professor, Government Arts College, Nandanam stated that these scribes must also be evaluated on a qualitative basis. “The differently abled students are penalised for something that the scribe might have misinterpreted,” he said.
In the case of subjects like accountancy or mathematics, visuallyimpaired persons already come up with their own mechanism to write the answer which the scribes are not familiar with.
“When the scribe is from a different background and has no knowledge how an accountancy problem is to be worked out, the student suffers,” Mr. Raja pointed out.
A.N.S Prasad, State BJP spokesperson said, “The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and School Education Minister must intervene and appoint scribe teachers for each of the subjects that the differently abled students require.”