New Delhi: Sanjay Kumar, Secretary of the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, addressed a press conference on Sunday, May 17, and said that the Class 12 answer sheets had been scanned and PDF copies made before being checked.
Class 12 students raised questions over errors in the checking of the answer sheet this year. In response, Kumar said that some students feel that they should have received higher marks than those actually awarded to them.
It is not the new on-screen marking for CBSE, as it has been implemented earlier as well. Kumar added that the OSM system was introduced in 2014, but wasn’t continued then because of technical infrastructure limitations.
However, this year, the OSM system was brought back during the Class 12 examinations. In this system, the answer sheets of the students were scanned, then converted into PDF copies and then went to the evaluation.
A common error in evaluating the answer sheet was the totalling of marks, but now with this system, it has been completely eliminated, according to Kumar.
A total of 98 lakh copies were evaluated, and officials found out that around 13,000 answer sheets weren’t evaluated because they couldn’t be read properly after students used light-coloured ink.
“Ultimately, it was also found that in the end, we had about 13,000 such answer sheets, which we found that no matter how many times we scanned them, there was some illegibility in them because the ink used was of very light colour,” he stated.
Later on, the 13,000 such answer sheets were evaluated manually by teachers.
Charges for re-evaluation and verification
Kumar also announced the fee for re-evaluation and verification. A fee of Rs 100 will be charged for the students who wish to view their answer copies. A separate fee of Rs 100 will be charged if students wish to have their paper validated, and at last, Rs 25 applies for re-checking of the answer sheets.