Kathmandu, March 26

Office of the Controller of Examinations under National Examinations Board has admitted that there were errors in the question papers of Secondary Education Examination that began on March 24.

Students across the country faced difficulties due to errors in the question papers of compulsory English and compulsory Nepali. This time OCE had prepared separate question papers of compulsory subjects for the provinces.

Examination Controller Bishnu Prasad Adhikari admitted that there were errors in question papers. He also said that OCE had informed all the examination centres about the errors. The question papers were full of errors, including spelling and grammatical errors. Moreover, the instructions in the questions papers were misleading and ambiguous, which gave a serious trouble to students taking the exams.

OCE today called an emergency meeting of teachers and experts involved in preparing question papers. Issuing a statement later in the evening, OCE said  all examination centres were  informed about the errors as soon as those errors came to the notice of OCE officials.

According to Adhikari, the process of preparing question papers for SEE takes around five months.  “Before giving responsibility of preparing question papers, OCE creates a roster of subject experts. For each subject 12 to 15 subject experts are selected. Subject expert are asked to prepare three sets of question papers. The experts then submit the question papers to OCE. A second set of subject experts then enter the picture who check whether the question papers are of standard length and as per the prescribed syllabus. Having checked all this, the second set of experts finalise the question papers.

In the third stage, the selected questions are sent to printing press. As per Adhikari, the experts even check the typology and design of the question papers, which leaves almost no margin for error.

However, the errors seen in the question papers of this year’s exams tell a different story.