Kolkata, July 22 -- In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education (WBCHSE) will provide scanned images of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) answer sheets to students appearing for the upcoming Semester III Higher Secondary (HS) examinations.
Along with the scanned OMR sheets, the official answer key will also be made available, allowing students to assess their performance and calculate their probable scores independently, well before the declaration of results. Semester III examinations, scheduled to be held from September 8 to 22, will follow a multiple-choice question (MCQ) pattern, with students required to mark their answers on OMR sheets.
The Council had earlier deliberated on two options: providing carbon copies of the OMR sheets to students after the exam or uploading scanned copies online. Following internal discussions, the latter was approved for implementation.
"Students will write on standard OMR sheets, which will be scanned and uploaded to the Council's portal. Along with the official answer key, the scanned images of the OMR sheets will be made available to students before the results are declared," said WBCHSE president Chiranjib Bhattacharya.
To view their OMR sheets, students will need to log in to the Council's student portal using their registration number, roll number and a one-time password (OTP) sent to their registered mobile number. Once logged in, examinees will be presented with a subject-wise list, with each subject hyperlinked to a downloadable PDF of the respective scanned OMR sheet. WBCHSE officials believe this move will empower students to calculate their expected scores and flag any discrepancies immediately after the official results are published. "Since the evaluation will be entirely machine-based, the process is expected to be completed within a short span," said a senior official.
Sources indicated that, owing to the streamlined evaluation process, results for the Semester III examinations could be declared as early as October.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.