KARACHI: The Board of Intermediate Education Karachi (BIEK) is upgrading itself on many fronts ahead of their upcoming annual examinations which commence from June 18 (Saturday).

There are several changes, all for the better, happening at BIEK these days making the examination board standout among many other Intermediate boards of the province and everything is being done to facilitate the process of examination.

As is known already, this year’s examinations are based on three components — 40 per cent multiple choice questions (MCQs), 40pc short answer questions and 20pc long answer or theory questions. And most of the work in correcting the papers or answer sheets is now going to be done by extremely fast coding machines.

“That way we have managed to remove most human interaction while also unburdening the teachers,” BIEK chairman Dr Saeeduddin shared with Dawn.

Annual exams starting from Saturday

OMR sheets

The MCQs have been increased to 40pc this year. And for this section, the board is asking the students to use an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheet. They can use a black or blue ballpoint pen or whatever is suggested in the paper for them to use to mark the correct answers, which will then be marked checked by coding machines.

There are many sophisticated machines and computers brought in at BIEK from China to do all this work. The ones checking the MCQ OMR sheets are so fast that they are capable of checking 100 sheets in one minute.

Another change is for them to no longer attach B copies with their answer sheets or give long answers to the short answer questions, a practice that is usually carried out by students during the exams just to fill out space and make it look like they have worked very hard.

This time, especially for mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer science papers, they are just to give short and to the point answers in the spaces provided to them.

“There is no longer any need or space for providing irrelevant answers. This way we also want to synchronise the teaching with the examination system,” said Dr Saeeduddin.

He added that there had been an unfortunate practice of students writing whatever they liked, even nonsense, to fill up space and sometimes the overwhelmed teachers who were correcting the papers also skip reading the long answers while awarding marks thinking that the student must knew their stuff to write so much.

“Well, we are focusing on student learning outcomes [SLOs]. We are looking to check if the students are clear about the concepts. For this we are also going to overlook grammatical errors in their writing,” the BIEK chairman smiled.

Other changes and improvements include training of the central control officers (CCOs) and invigilators through daily workshops that are currently under way.

Supplementary exams

Since the future is going to be online, BIEK has also been working on helping students online. Instead of lining up outside bank branch windows at the BIEK office, the students can make their payments online. They will also be able to get their results earlier than usual since most of their papers are being checked by computers now. Also, there will be ease in getting their original certification.

“Many students these days are proceeding to China, Malaysia or Turkey for higher education after passing their Intermediate exams from here. And the makeshift certificates are no good for the colleges and universities of these countries. Earlier, it used to take up to two years to provide an original certificate, but now we can do it much sooner, as soon as we are done with the examination scrutiny, checking of the papers, etc,” informed the BIEK chairman.

Another change is allowing students to appear for supplementary exams four times.

“No college will give admission to a student with less than 45 per cent marks, so we are going to allow our students more changes to improve in grades. We are also looking into doing away with the word ‘supplementary’ or it slang form of ‘supplee’ now in order to remove the embarrassment from appearing in these exams,” he added.

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2022