Reflections

All hail to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing disclosure of evaluated answer sheets of any public or professional examination to students under the purview of the RTI Act! Now this I say, is some real good work! A Bench of Justice AK Patnaik and RV Raveendran upheld the order of Calcutta High Court regarding disclosure of answer sheets to the students stating that answer sheets come under the purview of “information” as defined in the RTI Act! Talking from personal experience of a nerd who perhaps slogged her hours mugging for the CBSE Board Examinations and yet landing up with marks below expectations, a step such as this would be just enough to satiate my curiosity regarding “where I went wrong” or perhaps “where they (examiners) went wrong”! Additionally, if I was planning to give my answer sheets for re evaluation, I would be more sure about the need for a re evaluation after knowing what really went wrong with my answers. It is understandable why the major examination bodies ...

They say experience is the best teacher. And two experiences then are better teachers, I guess. So here are two such experiences that gave me two entirely different perspectives, yet zeroing down to perhaps just one conclusion. The Staff Selection Commission conducts examinations for graduates and post graduates for various government posts, apart from UPSC and DSSSB. Examinations for the posts that can be taken up by Visually Impaired Students have the provision of Scribes to make the examination smooth and accessible to the students. Keeping aside the whole debatable concept of “posts that can be taken up by the Visually Impaired”, here I am going to discuss two such instances when I became a Scribe for a few Visually Impaired persons appearing for the SSC Examinations. During my first attempt at writing the reading and writing the paper for a visually impaired person, I went through three hours of emotional blackmailing by the candidate trying to cajole me into filling up the answ...