The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is justifiably being raked ever the coals for botching up its transition to electronic evaluation of answer scripts written by Class 12 students. This comes right after the leak of the NEET-UG entrance question paper last month, due to which 28 lakh aspirants will have to take the exam again on June 21. Not only are such failures exposing lakhs of students to unnecessary anxiety, but they are also leading to a loss of confidence in the examination agencies operating under the purview of the Union Ministry of Education.
This year, CBSE introduced the on-screen marking (OSM) system for the Class 12 exam in which scanned copies of students’ answer scripts are marked online, rather than physically, by evaluators distributed across the country. The system was meant to bring in greater transparency, speed, and accuracy.
The transparency part of the deal worked rather unwittingly well, for all it took to expose the board’s ham-handed implementation was a Delhi student’s attempt to verify the marks awarded to him for physics. When the results of this year’s Class 12 exam were released earlier this month, there was a startling three percentage point dip in the pass rate. Students who thought they got lower marks than expected rushed to apply to see how their answer scripts were scored. The Delhi student was astonished to find that the physics answer script marked in his name was not his.
That faux pas blew up on social media, and the outcry led to the detection of several other flaws in the OSM transition. Electronic evaluation, as implemented by CBSE, has come up woefully short with poor image quality, missed answers and supplementary sheets, and misallocation of answer scripts. Students who managed to see the scanned copies of their marked answer sheets reported that some of the images were so blurred as to be unreadable; some were saved wrong side up; and some had their answers obscured by browser frames, timestamps, etc. Reportedly, some 68,000 scripts had to be rescanned, and 13,500 manually rechecked.
Arguably, these glitches amount to a small proportion of the total number of answer scripts (98 lakh) handled by the OSM system. But it is fair to ask whether evaluators’ screen fatigue was not a factor in the discrepancies reported by students, especially when the scorers were working to frenetic deadlines and with inadequate infrastructure and training. The students are justified in asking how fair their evaluation was when the image of their script was barely readable. For instance, many of them have reported that they were docked marks even though their answers matched the official marking scheme.
Manual-to-online transitions are difficult, and the jury’s out there on the question of whether one is superior to the other. Not the least of the difficulties is the present logjam in the OSM portal due to the stampede of students wanting to verify their marks. The CBSE has generously lowered the fee for it, but the system was patently not designed to handle the current traffic of anxious queries and payments. This is typical of all online transitions: The cost efficiencies are eagerly calculated, the fairness factor is glossed over, and the redressal window is left unattended. All this could have been avoided had CBSE asked the best consultant in the business, the teacher.