We are witnessing a summer of soaring distrust, despair and discontent. Yet through this dark cloud, we see hope in how some students have held an ethical mirror to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Earlier this month, 23 lakh students who had appeared for the medical entrance test (NEET) were devastated to learn that it was compromised and cancelled.
While investigations were still underway to unearth the organised network for the paper ‘loot’, another trauma lay in store for those who took the class 12 CBSE exam. Students who managed to overcome the malfunctioning portal saw staggering discrepancies in their marks and answer sheets. With no official help forthcoming, they posted on social media to warn others about the wrongly evaluated, badly scanned or mismatched sheets not even belonging to them. For this, some were trolled with perverse, abusive comments.
This year, CBSE introduced an on-screen marking (OSM) system for the class 12 exam. Answer sheets of 18 lakh students (amounting to over 90 lakh for all subjects) were scanned, and the digitised copies sent for evaluation by teachers. Students have demanded re-evaluation of more than 11 lakh answer sheets. But the portal is now closed, and there could be many more who have been wronged. Their anguished voices have mobilised the media towards sustained attention and sound investigative reports. Serious questions are being raised about a shoddy exercise hurriedly implemented through a bidding process that relaxed key requirements and chose a company with a tainted record. This caused incalculable loss to students in terms of their results, mental trauma, and disruption of their plans for college. With only 30,000 schools, CBSE is much smaller than some state boards, such as Maharashtra, MP or Odisha, making the lapses all the more difficult to understand.
Young class 12 students such as Nisarga Adhikary and Sarthak Sidhant appear to have ethically decoded some of these lapses. Significantly, Nisarga, who trained as an ethical hacker, had reportedly warned the company Coempt Edu Teck, the vendor responsible for the OSM system, and CBSE about major vulnerabilities in the portal. His technical reports were ignored then, and now he’s been facing staunch denials. It does not bode well when an academic authority like CBSE completely loses the trust of young students, who ethically use their knowledge and agency not for themselves but for the public good.
What is even more shocking is the campaign where videos have been made by school principals and children, giving false statements about the OSM checking process being more efficient and less biased because marks are strictly on the basis of what is written in the answer sheet. A social media post by a student exclaims, “My school has gone MADDD”, lamenting that teachers were traumatising them to tell lies even though they had passed out of school last year, before the OSM.
Indeed, such false propaganda to push for digital evaluation is deeply worrying. Digital marking is not the panacea that CBSE and the technology industry. claim it to be. Teachers who assessed the answer sheets this year have experienced an unsettling environment where they were regimented to work on screens, through often blurry scans, as they tried to decipher different handwriting, discern what students had written and make judgments about their answers. They were also being ‘watched’, as one teacher said, and the centre got a call if someone seemed to take longer. Their voices are being heard, albeit anonymously.
Assessment is not a mechanical scrolling of our eyes on a page; it involves human cognitive processing with professional understanding. As teachers, we evaluate a student’s work with moral responsibility, we flip back and forth to decide what they understand and how to mark that fairly. Already, the multiple-choice question (MCQ) format of most of our entrance tests, chosen for being machine-scorable, is acutely limiting the value of what we assess. Tick marks on a page do not assess a student’s analytical understanding and ability to express ideas. More competitive examinations based on superficial MCQ or short-answer formats need speed and memory recall, pushing them into the commercial arms of the coaching industry.
If we constrain teachers’ human acumen to assess by resorting to digital convenience, we will not be doing justice to our students. We risk cursorily eliminating them from the educational opportunities they deserve. We need to reframe school-leaving board examinations with assessment items and tasks that demand critical thinking, honed through better schooling. Technologies require responsible, knowledgeable and trustworthy decisions to nurture ingenuity with equity. Let our academic bodies win their trust and seriously reckon with those digital allurements that do not bode well for the future of our children. The students have admirably shown they are ready to work with us in this direction.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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