Addressing a press conference, Sanjay Kumar, Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, said: “Some students feel that they should have secured higher marks than those already awarded to them. I would like to stress that screen marking is not a new concept and this is not the first time it has been done.”According to Kumar, the CBI first introduced the OSM system in 2014, but was unable to continue thereafter due to technical infrastructure limitations.He said the system was successfully reinstated this year during the Class 12 board examinations. As part of this process, the answer sheets were scanned and converted into PDF versions before assessment. Kumar said that the answer sheets of about 98,000 students were checked for the exams.
The official added that three levels of security were maintained during the scanning process. He also said that one of the biggest advantages of digital assessment is the elimination of errors in the aggregate marks.
“One advantage of this is that errors that sometimes occurred in assembly have been completely eliminated,” he said.Kumar also said that teachers were trained before implementing the system. However, officials found about 13,000 answer sheets that could not be read properly after scanning because students used too light-colored ink.“In the end, it also turned out that in the end, we had about 13,000 answer sheets, and we found that no matter how many times we scanned them, there was some unreadability in them because the ink used was too light in color,” he said. These answer sheets were later manually checked by the teachers and the marks were added to the system. Special attention has been paid to security and accuracy so that the screen labeling process remains reliable, Kumar said.Besides defending the new marking process, Kumar also announced changes related to re-evaluation and verification. “We will charge a fee of Rs 100 from any student who wishes to view his answer sheets; a separate fee of Rs 100 applies if he wishes to check the correctness of his papers; and a fee of Rs 25 applies for re-checking the answer to any given question.”
He added that if a student’s grades increase after auditing or re-evaluation, the full amount that the student paid will be refunded.He said the Education Ministry and CBSE want to ensure that no student feels unfairly discriminated against. “Be it the Ministry of Education or the Central Board of Secondary Education, the welfare and concerns of all our children are of utmost importance to us,” Kumar said. He added that the requirement for re-evaluation had always been there in the CBSE system and assured students that the board would ensure that the marks awarded and the total were “completely accurate”.
