Chaitali Dutta, president of the Madhyamik board, apologises for the mix-up on Friday evening. Picture courtesy STAR Ananda

Madhyamik got off to a messy start on Friday with some examinees at South Point High School being forced to write their Urdu exam twice over after the invigilators realised they had received the wrong set of question papers.

Nilufer Khatoon of Monu Memorial Institution, an Urdu-medium school in Topsia, stepped out of her examination centre at South Point well past 6pm looking weary after the day’s ordeal. “I completed answering the Urdu question paper given to me in the scheduled time, only to realise that some of my classmates had received a different paper,” she recounted to Metro. “Then we were asked to write the correct paper all over again.”

Fellow examinee Shaheen stood next to her sobbing.

The error took long to be detected because the subject was the same, only the paper was different. Nilufer and nine other examinees had been given the Urdu question paper meant for candidates repeating the exam. This paper was based on the syllabi for classes IX and X, as was the rule until 2011. From this year onwards, Madhyamik examinees are required to study only the Class X syllabus for the test.

None of the students could immediately detect they had been given the wrong paper because the questions looked familiar. “We answered some of the questions from memory, having studied those chapters in Class IX,” a student said.

Similar confusion was reported in examination centres elsewhere, from Howrah to North Dinajpur. In at least one such centre, the examinees were not allowed to rewrite their exam even after the mistake had been detected.

At Salkia Vidyapeeth in Howrah, 24 students were given the Hindi first language paper meant for candidates repeating the exam. Some of them reported the error immediately, but were told to answer the question paper given to them.

After the final bell, the students and their guardians went to Golabari police station to lodge a complaint against the school.

A group of 10 students scheduled to write their Hindi first-language paper at the Kaliganj High School centre in North Dinajpur district were shocked to receive the Urdu question paper. An hour was lost trying to figure out what to do. When the students were finally given a Hindi question paper, it turned out to be the one based on the combined syllabi and meant for candidates repeating the test. But the examinees were allegedly forced to write the wrong paper and complete it in the remaining two hours.

Centre in-charge Aparna Sur told reporters later: “It was a small problem and the allegation that the mistake was corrected only after one-and-a-half hours is untrue. It didn’t take long to sort out the problem.”

Kashipur Boys’ School in Budge Budge, South 24-Parganas district, and Balarampur Phulchand Uchcha Vidyalaya in Purulia also witnessed a mix-up.

In Calcutta, board president Chaitali Dutta apologised for the mistakes and admitted that at least 100 students across the state had been affected. “We still do not know what to do with the students who were not given the correct question papers even after the mix-up was detected. We will have to find a way to solve the problem. Aami kshama chaichhi (I seek forgiveness),” she said.

Complaints continued to pour in from various centres till late on Friday, Dutta confirmed.

The Madhyamik board had this year introduced colour coding of question-paper packets to ensure such mistakes did not occur. The first day’s confusion means the move has bombed.

An official said the board had failed to train examination officials properly after the changes were made. “Otherwise, how can teachers of so many schools make the same mistake?” he wondered.

Last year, one school — at Dinhata in Cooch Behar — had mixed up papers. The entire exam schedule had to be changed after the school mistakenly distributed the physical science paper instead of history. So lax are the board’s rules that no action was taken against the teachers responsible for it. The institution was taken off the exam-centre list, which might have pleased the staff rather than make them unhappy.

Krishna Damani of South Point said of Friday’s gaffe: “It was a human error, but it should not have happened.”

“At South Point, there were no repeat candidates, all of them were fresh candidates. The teacher (on duty) was under the impression that there would be only one set of question papers, so the code in the packet was overlooked,” Damani added.