Hyderabad: A three-member committee appointed by the government to inquire into the Intermediate marks goof-up found that the Board of Intermediate Examinations and the IT agency Globarena Technologies had committed grave mistakes in the examination process and preparing the results.
“The possibility of taking legal action will be decided by the state government,” said education department secretary B. Janardhan Reddy who released the 10-page report on Saturday.
The errors in the results have led to 18 students ending their lives. Two others are in a critical condition after attempting suicide and one youth is missing. The National Human Rights Commi-ssion has asked for a report from the state government. The report was prepared by Telangana State Technology Services managing director Prof. Venkatrama Rao, Prof. A. Vasan of BITS-Pilani Hyderabad, and Dr Nishant Dongri, an assistant professor from IIT-Hyderabad. The main errors were found in the ‘bubbling’ of marks which is a process to be carried out by the examiners. It was found that they awarded single digit marks to students in mathematics. The committee found that coding error led to the display of ‘AF’ (absent and fail) and ‘AP’ (absent and pass) in marks memo.
The errors were both manual, which were not picked up in the various levels of checking, and supervision, and in data tabulation. The committee noted that a few centres had not followed the defined process. There were grave problems in those centres where the awarding of marks was a major cause for concern.
Subject-wise analysis suggested
There was no difference in the pattern of results from last year, but the new software developed for the tabulation of results was not followed properly by the staff. There were supervision problems in the department during the checking process.
The committee has suggested that there must be a subject-wise analysis of the papers as students who scored 80 per cent in the first year and got less marks in the second year or failed.
It has stated that reverification has to be done with utmost priority and updated results delivered within a week.
The committee found that the BIE’s server still had defects like load inadequacy, payment gateway issues, errors in acknowledgment of payment and mismatch in result database. These errors have to be monitored properly by dedicated officials.
If the server issues still persist, officials should manually perform tasks. An independent agency must supervise the process of reverification of marks, the committee said. The existing software module can be deployed for this activity.
