A Colleague's Idiom Key Has Two Bad Pairs, and 42 Scripts Are Due Tomorrow
At a Parishad school near Nashik, a Second-Language Gujarati teacher has just finished marking the 10-mark vocabulary section of a unit test taken by 42 Std IX students. Question 3 is a matching item: five idioms, two marks per correct pair. The key prepared by a colleague gives: આંખનો તારો - વહાલું; માથું ખાવું - પરેશાન કરવું; કાન ભરવા - સાંભળવું; હાથ ખાલી - નિષ્ફળ જવું; દાંત ખાટા કરવા - કડવો અનુભવ થવો. While marking she finds that 31 students wrote કાન ભરવા = ખોટી વાત કહીને ભંભેરવું, and 27 wrote હાથ ખાલી = કંઈ હાથ ન લાગવું. Two of the five idioms do not appear anywhere in the textbook glossary; they were taken from a market guide. Marks are due at the cluster meeting tomorrow morning, and the head has asked her to submit a one-page note on any key corrections before the registers are signed.
1. Judge each of the five key entries as defensible or wrong, giving your reason for each.
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Go pair by pair, testing each gloss against the textbook glossary first and a standard Gujarati dictionary second, not against the guide.
- આંખનો તારો - વહાલું: defensible. The sense 'extremely dear' is standard and appears in the textbook.
- માથું ખાવું - પરેશાન કરવું: defensible but loose. The core sense is 'to nag, to weary someone with repeated demands'. 'પરેશાન કરવું' is broad, and the students' 'વારંવાર કહીને ત્રાસ આપવો' is a sharper, equally correct gloss. Accept both.
- કાન ભરવા - સાંભળવું: wrong. કાન ભરવા means to poison someone's ears, to instigate by telling tales. 'સાંભળવું' is the opposite direction of the image and cannot be defended.
- હાથ ખાલી - નિષ્ફળ જવું: too narrow. The idiom means to come away with nothing, to have gained nothing; failure is only one situation that produces it. Both the key gloss and the students' 'કંઈ હાથ ન લાગવું' are acceptable.
- દાંત ખાટા કરવા - કડવો અનુભવ થવો: defensible and standard.
Conclusion: one entry is plainly wrong, one is too narrow, three are acceptable. The pattern is typical of a guide-derived key: idioms get translated word by word instead of by situation.
2. Set a marking policy that the 42 scripts can be settled by tonight without unfairness. State what each group of students gets and why.
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The governing principle is that a candidate must not lose marks for a marker's error, but must also not gain marks for an answer the key correctly rejects.
કાન ભરવા (31 students): the key is wrong, so nobody is penalised. Award 2 marks to every script that gave the instigate/poison-the-ears sense, and also 2 marks to any student who followed the wrong key and wrote 'સાંળવું'-type glosses, because the item itself was defective. Simplest and most transparent: give the pair to the whole class and record it as an annulled pair.
હાથ ખાલી (27 students): the key gloss and the students' gloss describe the same situation, so award full 2 marks to both wordings. Do not convert this into a half-mark compromise; the meanings overlap, they are not rivals.
Before the registers are signed, write the one-page note the head asked for: which pair was annulled, which glosses were widened, and the reason in one line each. Keep the original key on file with the corrections marked, so that any parent query can be answered from evidence rather than memory.
3. Redesign Question 3 so that next year's version cannot repeat this dispute.
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The defect is the format, not only the key. A matching item with one-word glosses invites exactly this fight, because idioms have situational meanings and single synonyms always under- or over-translate them.
Replace matching with a contextual completion using a word bank: પાંચ વાક્યો, અને કૌંસમાંથી સાચો રૂઢિપ્રયોગ ભરો, e.g. 'રમેશે બધાને ખોટી વાતો કહીને રાજના ___.' Now the answer is fixed by the sentence, and the sense 'ભંભેરવું' is forced by the context rather than by a gloss.
Two further safeguards. First, restrict the item to idioms printed in the textbook glossary, or print a short glossary with any outside idiom. Second, have two teachers write the key independently before the paper is duplicated, and compare; where their glosses differ, either widen the key deliberately or drop the item. This costs fifteen minutes and removes the whole category of dispute. Also keep the mark scheme separate from the question paper so that corrections can be issued without invalidating the printed paper.