It has been a torrid summer for students taking major examinations: first the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Undergraduate (NEET-UG) and then the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 examination. Both are riven by corrupt practices or monumental bungling in marking of answer sheets, frustrating students’ plans for a smooth entry into higher education courses. After the National Testing Agency, which conducted NEET, it is the turn of the CBSE to present a picture of incompetence. As the defining national examination for about 1.7 million students, it is the Board’s responsibility to ensure that the newly introduced Onscreen Marking System (OSM) performs without error. It comes as a shock that the OSM system was riddled with errors, and egregious mistakes were revealed, fortuitously, by a candidate who sought revaluation of his physics answer paper because he got lower marks than anticipated. What could explain the switching of the candidate’s paper with that of another and the CBSE trying to bury the matter by supplying the correct answer sheets subsequently? Others have complained of blurred answer sheet scans being uploaded for marking, missing answer sheets, and correct answers not being marked. Such serious errors in the OSM process have an impact even beyond national borders because many expatriate families enrol their children in overseas CBSE schools. The only legitimate course open to the NDA government is to fix accountability. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has taken responsibility for the fiasco, but such a statement rings hollow against a backdrop of continued inaction. Any attempt to brazen out the crisis will further erode the government’s credibility.
While patent criminality may be involved in the NEET leaks, the CBSE OSM system appears to be riddled with managerial goof-ups. It defies logic that the government decided to entrust the exercise to a Hyderabad-based educational technology company without insisting on rigorous testing to ensure zero error—even one candidate getting marked wrongly would be unacceptable. It is alarming that the response of pro-government agents to the first candidate who reported the answer paper mix-up was to unleash vicious trolling; even a Doordarshan anchor entered the fray, terming him a Pakistani. A separate, responsible disclosure of holes in the OSM portal to the premier cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, by an ethical hacker appears to have been simply ignored. Serious questions have been raised about the private company hired for the examination exercise, including continued patronage extended to it, although it was involved in a controversy in Telangana’s intermediate examination in an earlier avatar. Wiser after the fact, the IIT Madras has been asked to review the CBSE’s technology initiatives. It is unconscionable that governments persist with poorly thought-out decisions when vulnerable students are involved. Many suicides are linked to failure in key examinations each year. Experiments with examinations belong to the laboratory where they must prove their credibility. Students cannot be turned into guinea pigs.
