Prized moment: Students at Karim City College

Jamshedpur, Sept. 2: Its expertise in Urdu has opened a new chapter for Karim City College.

It will now start a centre of National Testing Service (NTS), a unit of the Union HRD ministry approved Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, to compile 12 lakh questions in Urdu. With this the college, an affiliate of Ranchi University, will become the first regional field unit of the NTS in Bihar and Jharkhand.

Schools and colleges would also be allowed to select questions from this bank to set internal examination papers. It will also assist the Union Public Service Commission select questions for public examinations. Besides Urdu, question banks will be prepared in Hindi and Tamil as well. A special software will also be developed to feed the questions, varying in the difficulty level.

The NTS, which was commissioned last year and has 50 centres across the country, aims to design a mechanism to test the competence of students in a given language. “Though there is a set pattern of questions in schools and colleges, no initiative is taken to check a student’s competency in a language. Now, with Urdu, we will contribute to the database of 12 lakh questions,” said Ahmed Badr, the co-ordinator of NTS in Karim City College.

Badr said Karim City was the only college in Bihar and Jharkhand to have sent an application after CIIL issued a public notice. Then a team visited the college campus for an inspection in January.

The college has already started the process of selecting resource personnel for the programme. Over a hundred teachers, lecturers and professors have been short-listed for the task. “But the teachers need to be trained. They need to understand how proficient a Class X can be in Urdu. Once through with the research on the syllabi of schools and colleges, we would be in a position to work on the question bank,” said Badr.

A resource person for the project needs to at least have an honours in Urdu. Though the number of personnel to be appointed for the project has not been decided, Karim City is expected to finalise the list by September-end.