Ongole: Government introduces digital evaluation for Inter Supplementary exams

Ongole : The State government is introducing a revolutionary change in the method of evaluation of Intermediate exam papers.

For the ongoing advanced supplementary exams for the Intermediate course students, there won’t be any organising of spot evaluation. Instead, the evaluators would do the correction online by logging into their laptops or desktops from the comfort of their homes or the college where they are working.

The advancement of technology and the foolproof proven methods in the private sector encouraged the Government of Andhra Pradesh to introduce the digital evaluation method, as a pilot project, for the advanced supplementary exams for the Intermediate course.

In simple terms, the government scans the answer booklet of the candidate, uploads it to a cloud server, gives access to it by creating a User ID and password to the evaluator, and the evaluator awards the marks to the answers without the need for organising the spot, travel and securely shifting the answer booklets from one place to another place.

However, the government took all measures to make this digital evaluation process, an error-free exercise. After the conduct of each exam, the answer sheets of the students would be sent to the regional reception and scanning centres, where the digital operators scan each page of the answer booklet, allot a code and upload them to the cloud server. These answer sheets of students from one district would be sent to evaluators from other districts after the completion of randomization.

The qualified evaluators identified by the Intermediate Board would be given a username and password, and they log into the server with the credentials. With the pencil tool in the dashboard, the evaluator corrects the answers, enters marks for each question in the given table and completes the evaluation. The evaluator gets the next answer booklet only after he corrects the earlier booklet. The in-charge, mostly the principal of the college, and the officials at the district and State get the details like the number of answer booklets corrected by each evaluator on each day, and the cumulative booklets corrected and pending at any given time.

After the completion of the evaluation at all centres, the government can announce the results with less human interference and errors.

Simon Victor, Regional Inspection Officer for the Board of Intermediate Education in Ongole, said that the government set up regional reception and scanning centres at six places in the State, including Ongole, Visakhapatnam, Rajahmundry, Guntur, Tirupati and Kurnool. He said that the scanning of each answer booklet with 24 pages takes only three minutes.

He said that they are equipped with 21 scanners in Ongole, and each regional reception and scanning centre is to scan more than two lakh booklets for evaluation. He said that the evaluator would be monitored through the webcam, as in the certification exams by technical bodies around the world, while he is evaluating the answers. He said that based on the experience in the evaluation of the answer booklets in the advanced supplementary exams, the government would implement the same for the evaluation of the papers of regular exams.