When ‘creativity’ blooms in exam halls...

  • | Thursday | 17th May, 2018

For the teachers too, it is a stressful period, as they value the exam papers with care and responsibility. Sometimes the answers are downright funny and often when they can’t award marks, they can’t but admire the creativity. But even in this high-strung phase, there are light moments, the teachers confide, as they correct the answer papers. “Can you fault the student who read the Malayalam question and wrote prolifically on farming, the importance of nutrition of the soil and so on?” Binoj asks with a laugh. In sociology, there was a question that required the student to define accommodation which was translated as ‘Samarasapeduka’.

It is that time of the year when the sleepless nights and all the hard work pays off. Certain boards have announced the results already while a section of the students is waiting with their fingers crossed for the D Day. For the teachers too, it is a stressful period, as they value the exam papers with care and responsibility. But even in this high-strung phase, there are light moments, the teachers confide, as they correct the answer papers. Sometimes the answers are downright funny and often when they can’t award marks, they can’t but admire the creativity. Some teachers who did valuation duty shared these ‘gems’ with us.Bindu Jayanand, a Plus Two teacher from Thiruvananathapuram, could not but laugh aloud at this answer for the question in biology to define hotspots. The term in question was to do with biodiversity; a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity that is threatened with destruction. But more than one student mistook it for mobile hotspots. “They wrote that it was the place that had mobile range. And for ‘red data book’ (the state document established for documenting rare and endangered species of animals, plants and fungi ) they wrote that it was a book where data is given in red colour,” she says.Hareendranath, an English teacher from Kozhikode, says, “My students have the William Wordsworth poem, To Sleep in their syllabus. There was this question — What are the measures to be taken to get sound sleep (in the context of the poem)? Mistaking ‘sound’ for snoring, some gave suggestions including stuffing cotton inside the nose, shaking the head, sprinkling water and so on. Another one was to write four interview questions that can be posed to APJ Abdul Kalam. “One student came up with these basic ones, What is your name? What is your job? Where is your house? What is your father’s name?” Hareendranath doesn’t want to reveal the marks he awarded, however.Sociology surely lends itself to many interpretations. When asked to differentiate sex and gender, the teachers were supplied with step by step explanations on making love by a few students.Binoj CB, a sociology teacher from Kozhikode, says, “Sometimes questions come with hints. The hint given for the question to differentiate ‘urban and rural’ was ‘homogeneity and heterogeneity’. Interestingly the students misinterpreted these terms to mean ‘homosexual and heterosexual’ and the mood suddenly changed in the valuation room.”For Plus Two, the questions are given both in English and Malayalam. In sociology, there was a question that required the student to define accommodation which was translated as ‘Samarasapeduka’. Binoj tells us, “There was an intelligent answer though it was wrong. A student split the word Samarasapeduka into Samaram (strike) and rasapeduka (interesting). The student then drew the conclusion that often, those who organise the strikes also enjoy the process immensely and go on organising it.” The student even gave examples including the secretariat strike organised by the LDF which was then in the opposition.Similarly, fertility may be the natural capability to produce offspring but in Malayalam, the word given was phalabooyishtatha. “Can you fault the student who read the Malayalam question and wrote prolifically on farming, the importance of nutrition of the soil and so on?” Binoj asks with a laugh.

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