Gujarat Board seeks tougher paper for SSC, outsourcing the work

The Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB) has decided to make tougher the SSC multiple choice question (MCQ) paper. Say it interesting or untoward, but the board thinks its teachers are not up to the mark to do the job of setting tougher questions, and henceforth, has decided to outsource the work from some independent agencies.
The board’s officer on special duty (OSD), M M Pathan, revealed that an agency would be hired to devise a bank of tough MCQs that would aim at testing the students’ understanding about the subject. He further disclosed that last year around 5% questions in the MCQ paper of 50 marks were intentionally asked of a higher standard in order to scale up the knowledge level of board students. Following that, this year the number of tough questions would be bigger.
Viewing the competition scenario, the state board students should be in line with the students of central and international boards, and in order to make that happen, their level has to be raised, letting them perform equally well in the national level competitive exams, said Pathan.
Initially, the board had assigned the GSHSEB teachers for the task of formulating a bank of questions that would pose teasers to the students and cream out the brightest from the average students. But sadly, out of the 1, 500 questions submitted by the teachers of each subject, only 30 (apprx) were qualified to come into the category of 'tough'. Most of the questions were found to be picked from the guides available in the market.
Disappointed by this, the board has come up with this decision give the task of preparing a bank of brain-teasing questions from the textbooks to outside agency. This question bank will be used in the SSC question papers for the year 2014.