In a critical move, BIEK brings in machines to check MCQs.

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...