Inter results' fiasco making of TSBIE

Hyderabad: A hasty decision by the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) led to the mess it is now facing in the declaration of Intermediate Public Examination-2019 (IPE-2019) results.

According to the TSBIE sources, soon after the Inter first and second year results were announced in the neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh, the board for reasons best known to itself had put unnecessary pressure on the evaluators and almost doubled the number of answer scripts to be corrected during the spot evaluation process. Andhra Pradesh had announced the results on April 13.

Speaking to The Hans India, a TSBIE official said, as per the standard practice each examiner or evaluator is given 15 answer scripts in the morning and another 15 in the post-lunch for correction. Until an examiner completes the morning set of answer scripts, he or she is not handed over the second set of 15. The scrutiniser at the spot valuation shall examine the papers corrected which acts as a control mechanism to maintain the standard in the correction of the answer scripts. This practice has been followed for decades.

However, this time, the TSBIE has assigned about 45 answer scripts to the examiners right from the start of the spot valuation. This resulted in the evaluators coming under work pressure. Secondly, the number of answer scripts to be sent to each of the spot valuation centres is arrived after factoring the number of evaluators available and the number of the days of the spot valuation at the Centre. Though it is a matter of simple arithmetic, the Board has failed to do the job properly.

For example, the Hyderabad spot valuation centre has a greater number of evaluators. But the number of answer scripts the centre received was less. While the spot valuation centres at Nizamabad, Adilabad and other two-tier and three-tier centres, which do not have adequate staff, received answer scripts more than they could handle. This had forced the Board to recall and redistribute the answer sheets leading to delay in the process of evaluation.

This had further increased the pressure on the evaluators engaged in the spot valuation centres and the scrutinisers to correct as many answer scripts as possible to meet the targets given by the TSBIE.

This is said to be one of reasons for errors cropping up in the bubbling process of OMR sheets. The scrutinisers too have not complied with the standard procedures of the scrutiny like random checking of the answer scripts. All these mistakes showed up in scanning the OMR sheets to validate the roll numbers and awarding marks.

Adding to these woes, a private agency engaged in generating hall tickets had committed several errors. Another official pointed out that each examination centre is assigned with a code and examination centre for the hall ticket numbers are generated against the code numbers. However, the students had a tough time as the address against the code of the college given in their hall tickets were not tallying with each other.

Following this, the students had to figure out their examination centre to give IPE-2019 test. But, this turned into another headache for the Board forcing them to innovate a new nomenclature for temporary validation of results by inserting 'AF' (Absent and Fail) and 'AP' (Absent and Pass).

It was only "after the declaration of the results that the higher officials on the Board have woken up to the reality of a series of errors crept only when the students, parents and students organisations raising a hue and cry over the discrepancies in the results declared by the Board," the sources pointed out.