Even as the Board of Secondary Education (BSE), Odisha on Monday made a valiant effort uploading around 36,00,000 scanned OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) answer sheets of this year’s High School Certificate (HSC) examinees on website, hundreds of students and their parents staged a demonstration in front of the BSE office demanding, among other things, a re-evaluation of answer sheets in subjective section.
Nearly six lakh students appeared at the HSC (matriculation) examinations in February-March in six subjects having objective and subjective sections of equal mark. The results were published in haste on April 30 with blunders aplenty. Facing severe criticism, the BSE, in the meantime, rehashed the results twice to rectify the marks in objective sections of each of the six subjects and uploaded the OMR sheets after 12 days of publication of the results.
“But the students are still upset over the marks they have got in subjective sections, particularly in Science,” said a student leader, pointing out that some students have got between 45 and 50 marks in objective section and between 5 and 10 marks in subjective section, which is highly incongruent.While the BSE officials have invited applications from students for rechecking in their subjective papers in the requisite format at a cost, the All India DSO leaders demand that the rechecking be done afresh free of cost.
Under the AIDSO banner, the students, parents and eminent citizens staged a demonstration in front of the BSE office demanding complete scrapping of the gradation system of results, which was introduced for the first time this year. They also demanded reintroduction of publication of the results in booklet form as it is turning out to be a costly affair for the students to access their results through SMSs or from website.
“Due to the bloomers in the results and variance of marks in objective and subjective sections, many students committed suicide soon after the results were announced on April 30,”said AIDSO secretary Bhagyarabi Das.