Finance
The Education Ministry downplayed worries on Sunday about On-Screen Marking (OSM) impacting students’ grades in the CBSE Class 12 exams, stating that it is a mechanism used internationally to perform transparent review.
School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar stated that in order to address student concerns, the CBSE has decreased the cost of obtaining a copy of the answer book from Rs 700 to Rs 100. The cost of mark verification has been decreased from Rs 500 to Rs 100 per answer book, while the cost of re-evaluation has been reduced from Rs 100 to Rs 25 per question.
If the re-evaluation results in a rise in marks, the money would be reimbursed, Kumar stated. According to administrators, the decision was made to reduce pupils’ anxieties. They insisted that the OSM is a foolproof, uniform, and transparent marking method.
This year’s CBSE pass percentage has declined by almost three percentage points, from 88.39% previous year to 85.29%. The number of pupils achieving 90% or higher has likewise dropped to its lowest point since at least 2019. The on-screen marking system scans and evaluates answer books on computers; the Board implemented this system of marking for the Class 12 exams this year.
Kumar said the CBSE wanted to introduce OSM in 2014 itself, but it didn’t seem feasible with available technology then. “There are several institutions in the world and in the country that do this (OSM)…Mumbai University, Visvesvaraya University…,” he said.
This year, a total of 98 lakh answer books were scanned and PDFs were created, ensuring the order of the pages, Kumar said, adding that OSM added flexibility to the evaluation process — previously, marking was done in the geographical area of CBSE’s regional offices, but with OSM, papers could be sent outside the vicinity of regional offices, “bringing in more objectivity and transparency”.
He stated that because OSM is a digital process with a record of marks assigned to the answers, summing errors can be avoided.
A total of 13,000 answer books were found to be illegible, the ink in some cases were far too light to be fully legible after scanning. These answer sheets were checked manually, said Kumar.
On the drop in pass percentage, the School Education Secretary said: “There is a variation in the pass percentage…in the Covid years, it had spiked. The system is also stabilising. What may have been, I can’t answer with absolute certainty. Now the marking process has become more objective and standardised.”
CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh acknowledged that the on-screen marking system did face glitches when evaluation of major subjects began on March 17.
“When teachers logged in initially, there were glitches… Systems were hanging when they were first operationalised. There were downloading issues, but they were resolved in quick time, and by March 18, the system was working flawlessly…across multiple subjects, evaluations went on simultaneously,” he said.
“Boards have always stressed on stepwise evaluation and marking… It is not that step-wise marking has been brought in this year,” Singh said.
Source: IE
