Following multiple complaints by Class 12 students about discrepancies in the evaluation of their answer sheets, a four-member team with two experts each from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Kanpur will conduct a “full check-up” of the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) IT ecosystem, and submit a confidential report to the board, V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras told The Hindu. 

Over four lakh students have requested scanned copies of 11 lakh answer sheets amid complaints of blurry scans, wrong totalling, mismatched or missing sheets, and a pass rate of 85.20%, the lowest since 2019. 

The expert team will provide recommendations to the CBSE on how to carry out processes, including re-totalling of marks and re-evaluation of questions, Mr. Kamakoti said. 

While the CBSE introduced the ‘Onscreen Marking System’ for digitised answer scripts with the intention that expert evaluators from across India could evaluate the papers, this had caused some problems which CBSE had admitted, Mr. Kamakoti said. 

“While several lakh answer scripts were scanned and put in different files, there is a possibility that a sheet is missed while scanning because the person scanning the sheet did not place it properly or the image quality suffered,” Mr. Kamakoti said. 

The expert team is also looking into the reasons for the multiple crashes of the CBSE’s portal for applications for re-evaluation. “It may be a cyberattack or there may have been a surge in genuine user requests. For instance, when bots keep pumping requests, one sees a sudden surge in traffic and the portal starts slowing down. Many students complained that the payments were not going through [which could be] because the website was busy handling a lot of requests,” Mr. Kamakoti explained. 

If a lot of requests land on the same IP address, the web application firewall, while buffering requests in the queue, is not able to send all the requests to the server, and hence users experienced failed payments, he added. 

Examining the CBSE’s IT ecosystem was a “complex” process and the team would take some days to arrive at its recommendations, he said. “This is not a one-day job. Depending on the complexity of the systems, the team will take multiple days to arrive at recommendations and submit a confidential report to the CBSE,” Mr. Kamakoti said.