April 5, 2013, 12:00 am
The Central Board of Secondary Education has decided to give six bonus marks gratis to those who had received set number three of the mathematics paper this year in which question number 26 was erroneous irrespective of whether or not they attempted the question.
The decision was taken by the experts’ committee. The erroneous differential equation was "(Xex/y+y) dx = xdy" where instead of ’x/y’ it should have been ’y/x’. CBSE has confirmed the "printing mistake".
Being a six-mark question, students were in no mood to let it go and made numerous attempts to solve it, thereby losing time.
However, forums such as Parents Forum for Meaningful Education are questioning if such an error can ever be compensated simply by awarding full marks for it. Kusum Jain, an activist and a parent, said: "CBSE has been committing such mistakes repeatedly, especially in mathematics. How can one compensate for the loss of time, the stress and the fact that due to it some could not complete the paper?"
