Second topper in Bihar’s Class X exams of 2017 may become topper as Patna High Court orders probe into her claims
2 min readPATNA: The girl who became the second topper in Bihar’s class X examinations last year could be declared the topper as Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has been asked by Patna High Court to verify her claim that she scored more marks than the topper.
Bhavya Kumari, a student of Simultala Residential School in Jamui district, was declared the second topper in the state in 2017 as she scored 92.8 per cent marks (464 out of total 500) in the examinations. Prem Kumar, a student of Sree Govind High School in Lakhisarai district, was the topper with 93 per cent marks (465 out of total 500).
But Bhavya disagreed with the marks she had secured in Hindi, social studies and Sanskrit and claimed that the evaluation of her answers were inappropriate. She sought her answer sheets with the marks from BSEB through a Right to Information (RTI) application.
“A close look at her answer sheets, the marks assigned to her answers and the totaling of the marks made it clear that she absolutely deserves to be given six more marks. This would clearly make her the topper in the state in 2017,” said her lawyer Ratan Kumar.
While in Hindi, she secured 85 marks, it was made 80 without a reason, he claimed. “She was assigned five marks for her answer to question number six. But, after marking, five was turned into zero through overwriting. Besides, she was assigned no marks for two questions bearing two marks each even though she wrote the correct answers for them,” added Kumar.
He further claimed that the evaluators also assigned no marks for Bhavya’s correct answers for two questions in social studied and Sanskrit. “A look at the way of marking shows it was not done diligently,” added Kumar.
After hearing her plea about the allegedly inappropriate evaluation and marking of her answer sheets, Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh of Patna High Court on Tuesday asked BSEB to respond in four weeks. The HC also asked BSEB to form a committee to probe how five marks were reduced in Bhavya’s Hindi answer sheet.
“We hope for justice. We had sought the answer sheets through an RTI application on July 15, 2017. We got them nine months later, in March 2018,” said Bhavya’s father Ram Prakash Singh.
Courtesy: Express News Service
