LAHORE: A large number of intermediate students continued their protest demonstration on Wednesday against what they said sub-standard marking of their answer scripts.

The male and female students, carrying placards against the board administration, staged a protest demonstration in front of the Lahore board. They also marched from Lahore board to the Governor House.

They demanded that the government take a policy decision of re-assessing students’ scripts and save them from becoming victim of incompetence of the sub-examiners and their supervisor head examiners.

Talking to Dawn on Tuesday, they said male and female students from different institutions like Government College University, FC College, Kinnaird College and Punjab Group of Colleges were protesting because they had been given marks particularly in English and Urdu far below than their expectations.

They said the existing laws did not permit re-evaluation of their scripts and they would continue suffering the inefficiency of the examiners throughout their lives.

“The low remuneration of sub-examiners has failed to attract the quality teachers as sub-examiners, while the `professionals’ assess papers with least care,” a concerned parent lamented.

A father of a student said the board was charging Rs750 for the re-checking of each script and the cost kept many poor parents away from even availing the opportunity of re-checking.

“The government must waive off this fee or bring it to minimum level so that many parents could help their children verify their concerns,” he added.

A source in the board said it used to receive re-checking applications up to 9,000 but this year only 4,500 candidates had applied for re-checking.

PPP’s Faiza Malik had also raised students’ issue on the floor of the Punjab Assembly.

Punjab Higher Education Additional Secretary (Academics) Dr Shoaib said the department was constituting a committee and would do whatever could be done for the welfare of the students.

He said any policy decision would ultimately be taken by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

A BISE spokesman said the board had so far re-checked 1,000 applicants’ scripts and only three of them had written applications to the board chairman that their answer sheets had been marked unfairly.

He claimed that the protesters had not even applied for re-checking of their scripts and added that many of them had been declared fail in the examination.

He claimed that only 50 out of 650 Kinnaird College students were protesting.

To a question, the spokesman said the Lahore BISE candidates’ all scripts were sent to other eight boards in the province as part of inter-board marking policy. “Not a single script of Lahore BISE candidates has been assessed at the Lahore board,” he added.

He said the candidates could apply for re-checking till Oct 25. He said the board offices would refund the re-checking fee in case of any mistake in the answer sheet.

Meanwhile, the BISE spokesman said the intermediate (supplementary) examination for 2014 would begin from Oct 25.

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2014