THE SYSTEM:
You never write your name or school on the paper, so the evaluator does not know whose paper he/she is correcting, neither the school (remember not to mention your name or your school in any of the writing tasks in language papers as well)
Your paper may/may not be corrected within your own city/region
The teachers correcting board papers are normal school teachers
They will be led by a head of the correction centre who is again a school teacher with several years of experience
The teachers are given an answer key and random answer sheets to correct
THE ANSWER KEY:
An answer key comes from the board
In several correction centres, on the first day all the teachers under the guidance of the head examiner analyse the answer key and see if they need to make any changes to it
Teachers are generally instructed to follow the answer key, thus writing (and highlighting, as far as possible) key words is very important
The answer key generally:
consists of suggestive key words and phrases and certain points instead of full explained answers
contains a split up of marks within a single question (suppose it’s a 5 marks question, without sub divisions, the answer key will have a split of these 5 marks as well)
You should definitely take a look at an answer key for each of your subjects, to understand what metric a teacher uses to correct your paper. It is available on the CBSE site. http://cbse.nic.in/newsite/examination.html
Note: The above point does not imply that you write only keywords/ phrases as given in the answer key. Your answers should be explanatory but also include the key words at the same time.
EVALUATOR’S MINDSET AND INCENTIVE
You need to understand this and keep it in mind, as finally your marks are in the hands of a teacher and that teacher will not know who you are.
You need to impress the examiner (Read the articles on writing tips: WRITING TIPS)
More importantly, don’t irritate the examiner
While we have several teachers who are conscientious and considerate about the correction, unfortunately there also exist teachers, who are there to just correct papers and finish their work. They might even be correcting papers as they are forced to by their school and have no interest in the same so:
They might not pay attention to all what you’ve written but just skim over your answers (this is where highlighting helps)
They might not struggle to understand your handwriting and give you marks
Teachers may be in a hurry and are in a work-piece model, so they may not correct our papers as carefully as internal school corrections.
Note: The above is a description of possible and true scenarios that happens in board corrections. It is in no manner meant to disrespect our teachers. The above points definitely don’t apply to all teachers but just a few of them. The best principle is not to take risk.
Write your paper in a manner such that anyone correcting it will give you marks and there is no scope for deductions. Beating round the bush or not being neat enough will not go down well with all teachers.
CORRECTION VARIES WITH THE MARKS YOU SCORE
In General:
For papers scoring low: some teachers tend to be slightly lenient
For medium scoring papers: teachers do normal correction i.e. strict correction
Once you cross a 95/100 the entire picture changes as elaborated below
ABOVE 95
A score above 95 indicates a nearly perfect paper
Teachers become very strict and scrutinize the paper very well
They begin to search for reasons to cut marks (not because they don’t want you to score but other reasons as given below)
once a paper reaches a say 98, 99, 100,
the paper may be evaluated multiple times or by more than one teacher
the teacher may have to justify to a head examiner why she/he has awarded such high marks to that paper
In general a teacher would not want the head examiner to identify and mistake in his/her correction, so they become very careful and strict
The lesson to be learned from this: if you are planning to score above a 95, then you need to write the paper much more precisely and leave lesser and lesser scope for losing marks. Don’t take anything for granted. Examiners might spot a mistake anywhere, even a small inconsequential thing and cut a half mark. Your centum may just become a 99. (Not trying to demotivate you, but giving facts and personal experience to you.)
Side Note: For scoring above 95, the student should know the subject content in depth and should be well aware of the intricacies in subjective papers, typical examples, formulae, multiple cases and exceptions in objective papers.
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