Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government has caught as many as 500 teachers for errors in evaluation of Class 12 examinations. As per reports, most of the re-evaluated papers witnessed an increase of at least 10 marks. The government has sought for an explanation on why they couldn’t identify basic calculation errors.

The Times of India reported that the directorate of government examinations issued notices to the government teachers.

There are also reports of how one paper was marked 27 out of 100 but upon re-evaluating, the mark turned out to be 72. Another paper was marked 57 but when re-totalled, the mark increased to 81 out of 100.

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The newspaper quoted director of government examinations D Vasundhara Devi as saying, "Their duty is to prevent errors during the evaluation. But, they could not spot the errors. We will seek explanations from them."

Chief examiners, scrutiny officers and mark verification officers, who are responsible to spot the errors, are all in the dock for having failed to notice the errors. Reports suggest that numbers were different for page-wise and question-wise marks.

Teachers have also said that many of the mistakes took place because the answers were evaluated by one teacher and totalled by another, especially for Biology papers. They said that two teachers, one for botany and another for zoology corrected the papers, and thus could have led to confusion.

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Reports also suggested that 4,500 students applied for re-evaluation out of the 50,000 who had sought their answer scripts. The answer scripts that were re-evaluated saw an increase of 10 marks, at least, despite reports that suggest otherwise.

Class 12 exams in the state of Tamil Nadu began on March 1 and ended on March 19. Over eight lakh students had taken the exams.

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Tirupur district in Tamil Nadu recorded the highest number of Class 12 students who passed the board examinations in the state, with a pass percentage of 95.37. While the pass percentage of girl students was at 93.64, the pass percentage for boys was at 88.57.

The results were declared on April 19. Kanyakumari district recorded the highest pass percentage among government schools with 92.64.