In a press conference, Sanjay Kumar, Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy said, “Some students feel that they should have scored higher than they actually did. I would like to emphasize that on-screen marking is neither a new concept nor has it been implemented for the first time.”According to Kumar, CBSE first introduced the OSM system in 2014, but it could not continue due to technical infrastructure limitations.He said that this system was successfully brought back during the Class 12 board exams this year. During this process, the answer sheets were scanned and converted into PDF copies before evaluation. Kumar said that the answer sheets of around 9.8 lakh students were scanned for the exams.The official added that three levels of security were created during the scanning process. He also said that the biggest advantage of digital assessment is that errors in total marks were eliminated. He said that one of the benefits of this is that the mistakes that used to happen in totals have completely disappeared.Kumar added that teachers were trained before implementing the system. However, officials found around 13,000 answer sheets which could not be read properly after being scanned because the students had used too light colored ink.“Finally, it also turned out that at the end, we had about 13,000 such answer sheets, which we knew no matter how many times we scanned them, there was something wrong with 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 entered into the system. Kumar said that special attention has been paid to security and accuracy so that the on-screen marking process remains reliable.Along with 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 wants to see their answer sheet; a separate fee of Rs 100 is applicable if they want to verify their papers; and a fee of Rs 25 is applicable for re-checking the answer to a particular question,” he said. He further said that if a student’s marks increase after the examination or re-examination, all the money paid by the student will be refunded.He said that both the Ministry of Education and CBSE want to ensure that no student is marked unfairly. “Whether it is the Ministry of Education or the CBSE, the welfare and concerns of all our children are very important to us,” Kumar said. He added that the provision of re-evaluation was always in place in the CBSE system and assured the students that the board would ensure that the awarded marks and totals were “absolutely correct”.
