Waste in haste? 5 percent of SEE review seekers get their grades altered

Serious negligence by examiners and data entry operators has significantly undermined the integrity of Nepal's Secondary Education Examination (SEE) results. A mandatory recounting process has led to grade revisions for over five percent of applicants, exposing systemic flaws within the National Examination Board (NEB).

Following widespread dissatisfaction with the initial results published on May 12, 33,851 students paid a fee to request a recount. The board has processed 27,654 of these applications, discovering that 1,559 students, or 5.63 percent, were initially given incorrect marks. This year's error rate is higher than the typical three to four percent seen in previous years.

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Teachers repeatedly failed to tally the marks scored inside the answer booklets onto the cover sheets.

Officials attribute the spike in discrepancies to the decision to evaluate answer sheets directly within exam centers, which they claim compromised standard auditing practices. The revealed administrative carelessness includes instances where a student's GPA in Science was upgraded from 3.6 to a perfect 4.0, and another's English score jumped from 2.4 to 4.0. Alarmingly, one student initially marked as 'non-graded' with zero marks in English was upgraded to a 2.0 GPA after review.

Controller of Examinations Tuk Raj Adhikari admitted that "Teachers repeatedly failed to tally the marks scored inside the answer booklets onto the cover sheets." He also noted egregious data entry errors, such as a student scoring 70 marks being recorded as only 7. An anonymous official involved in the recounting process further revealed computational errors where marks were halved and students received failing grades due to zero marks being entered. The situation has caused distress among students and guardians, who blame the board and teachers for the psychological impact on young children. Compounding the crisis, the board has been unable to locate over 1,000 answer sheets, creating a logistical nightmare.

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We found cases where students had scored 68 marks inside the booklet, but due to computational errors, only 32 marks were recorded on the exterior script. Some students were handed a failing grade simply because their actual marks were entered as zero.