CHENNAI: To prevent irregularities, Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University will be implementing digital scanning and online evaluation methods to generate accurate marks to students.
At present, there are around 2.25 lakh candidates from about 780 affiliated institutions appearing for over 500 courses with the university examination spanning throughout the year.
A senior official from the university said, “Approximately, 10 lakh answer papers for medical, dental, Ayush, pharmacy, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and allied health science courses are processed each year for exams. Now, it has been proposed to introduce an end-to-end solution for digital scanning, imaging and on screen evaluation of booklets in a controlled manner.”
Stating that an IT company would be hired to develop the latest evaluation software through bidding process, the official said the software would provide an automated solution “starting from the process of scanning the descriptive answer sheets, multiple-choice questions with optical mark recognition answer sheets and evaluation of the answer sheets digitally and generation of marks to student accurately”.
The university conducts its exams annually, and also on a semester-basis. So, online evaluation can be done by authorised faculty members from anywhere. “Accordingly, a comprehensive dashboard for university administrators will also be developed to monitor and manage the evaluation process. One central scanning centre will be set up in the university premises,” he added.
The official pointed out that said a standard procedure would be followed to avoid duplication, missing pages and mixing of pages within answer booklets and proper quality check would be implemented by the IT firm after scanning to ensure 100% accuracy. “All the evaluation data will be stored in a secured environment compliant with ISO 27001 Standards or equivalent. Copy-paste and screen capture functionalities will be totally disabled during evaluation,” he stated. “The online evaluation system will also generate various reports including college-wise results, course-wise results and among others. The audit trail will be tamper-proof and accessible for post evaluation review.”