Holi day now! Students of a Siliguri school smeared with colours after their last Madhyamik paper. Telegraph picture

Calcutta, March 5: Flooded with complaints about mistakes in Madhyamik questions, the board of secondary education has decided to review this year’s question papers.

Board president Ujjwal Basu said the review was meant to ensure that examinees did not suffer for no fault of theirs.

A meeting with head examiners and scholars in subjects in which errors were detected will soon be held to look into the complaints, he added.

The results will be declared between the last week of May and first week of June.

The meeting will also discuss ways to stop the recurrence of mistakes in question papers in the future.

This time, there were wrong instructions, printing errors and differences in Bengali and English versions of the question papers, which led to confusion among students.

“A preliminary meeting has already been held to examine the complaints. The experts have so far confirmed two small errors in the life science question paper. But we want to conduct a thorough inquiry to examine the students’ complaints about the mistakes in other papers as well,” said Basu.

After the errors are confirmed, head examiners will be asked to instruct the examiners to ensure that they do not affect the students.

There were complaints of printing errors and misinformation after the Bengali (first language), English (second language), life science, geography and additional home science exams.

Today’s mathematics examination, however, passed off without complaints. Some students, however, felt the paper was lengthy.

At Suryapur High School near Islampur in North Dinajpur, teachers were assaulted because they prevented students from cheating. Police had to lathicharge a mob.

The examination, which began on February 20, ended today.

Basu said the results would be declared early in view of the Supreme Court directive to all education boards to publish the Class XII results by June 10 every year.

The directive was not meant for Class X examinations, but the board will have to publish the Madhyamik result before June 10 to maintain a balance in the academic calendar.

To stay abreast with the deadline, distribution of answer scripts among examiners has already started, a board official said.