CBSE to digitise assessment of answer sheets

Representative image only.

THE CENTRAL BOARD of Secondary Education (CBSE) proposes to digitise the assessment of answer sheets of its examinations. According to a CBSE spokesman, a pilot project will be conducted in Delhi for the English language paper of the Class XII examinations to be conducted in March 2012. It will include about 80,000 students in the city, he said. The assessment will be digitised through a technology called Onscreen Marking System (OMS), he said. In OMS, answer sheets are first scanned, and the images uploaded on a server. Each answer sheet and image has a unique identification code for tracking and tabulation of marks. Every examiner has a user ID and a password, using which he or she can access the images of the answer sheets over a computer at the evaluation centre. The examiner reads the answer sheet from the image, and enters the marks for each answer in the system. The OMS calculates the total marks scored by a student, and also tells the examiner if any answer has been missed. The CBSE expects one examiner to correct 25 answer sheets in a day, the spokesman said. OMS is expected to increase the accuracy as well as the speed of the evaluation of answer papers, he said. If the system is successful, then the technology would be implemented in other parts of the country from the academic session 2013-14, he also said. The system was first tested with 200 answer sheets in Delhi in March 2010. The feedback had been positive, and hence, it had been decided to extend the system to a larger number of students, he said. The CBSE had already floated a tender for developing the necessary software, the spokesman added.