Stress tests: Centralised examination systems are failing aspirants

The month of May exposed shocking flaws in the system of administering public exams within the purview of the Ministry of Education. Between the first and last weeks of the month, three consequential national exams ran into problems, ranging from outright corruption in the form of paper leaks to software glitches and rank inefficiency. The result is that millions of young people have been left in limbo.

 

The latest fiasco is the discovery of major discrepancies in the on-screen marking system (OSM) for Class XII board exams. Students accessing the post-result verification portal discovered blurred or missing pages, unmarked answers or, sometimes, the answer copies of other students. With 125,000 students applying for scanned copies of more than 1.1 million answer books, the portal crashed, forcing the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to extend deadlines and slash fees.  Following an investigative blog by a Class XII student, suggesting a rigged process in selecting a Hyderabad-based firm as the software vendor for the OSM, the CBSE asked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Madras and Kanpur to sort out the glitches and promised a “transparent and glitch-free process” from June 1. It is worth noting that complaints about discrepancies in answer sheets were raised as early as mid-May and it took the CBSE almost two weeks to address the issue. The CBSE has not chosen to investigate the software vendor.

 

This problem begs several questions. The first is why digitised evaluation was introduced when the earlier system of physical marking did not appear to be problematic. The CBSE’s explanation was that the OSM system was designed to eliminate mistakes in aggregating marks and manual evaluation, and to speed up the process. The reasoning may have been unexceptionable but the implementation clearly left much to be desired. Under the OSM system, handwritten answer scripts are scanned, anonymised and uploaded. Teachers then log in to a dedicated platform and correct the scripts under video surveillance. Some 1.7 million students sit for this exam each year, requiring over 9.8 million answer books to be manually scanned. Clearly, then, the system demands rigorous, iterative pilot testing. But the CBSE appears to have conducted some limited tests in 2024-25 before deciding to roll it out nationwide. Worse, teachers were not given adequate training; they were informed 10 days before the exams began on February 17 to familiarise themselves with the system, all of which created a perfect storm.

 

Over the past decade, attempts to centralise the public-examination system have consistently led to sub-optimal outcomes. Nothing exposed this better than the serial failures of the National Testing Agency (NTA), set up in 2017. The paper leak ahead of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test exposed the faults in the supposedly impregnable security framework. Weeks later, a technical glitch of the system operated by no less than Tata Consultancy Services caused a disruption in the Common University Entrance Test, with over 3,700 candidates unable to take the exam. Given the uber-competitiveness of the examination system, these fiascos have impacted the mental health of students at a particularly vulnerable time in their careers. Ironically, the NTA was ostensibly set up to reduce student stress by offering a standardised and fair evaluation framework. The results so far have belied that intent.