New Delhi: IIT Madras Director V Kamakoti Tuesday said a four-member team from the institute and IIT Kanpur has begun examining the recent glitches in the CBSE portal, including payment failures and allegations related to answer sheet uploads.
In an exclusive interview with PTI, Kamakoti said the team started examining the issue Monday evening, and the primary focus is to determine the exact cause of the disruption.
“There was an issue for around two days. So what was the actual reason for the failure? Was it some development issue, a technical issue, or was it even a cyber attack? Because anything is possible. So that is what we want to basically find out so that it doesn’t recur in future,” he said.
He also said the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) portal had remained stable for the last “72 hours-plus”.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Sunday directed IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur to depute professors and technical experts to assist the CBSE in ensuring a glitch-free re-evaluation process.
Kamakoti said the CBSE’s move to introduce the On-Screen Marking (OMS) is aimed at increasing transparency by allowing students to view evaluated answer sheets and understand where their marks were deducted.
“I think, from the CBSE’s point of view, they tried to do something very good,” he said, adding that the system “brings in a lot more transparency”.
“But somewhere, some payment or some gateway, something has failed,” he said.
The team will “go in depth” into the issue and examine “what could be a very robust platform that in future will not land us in this type of failure”.
The IIT Madras director said the team will first conduct a “full medical checkup” of the website and give suggestions and recommendations to the developers handling the platform, besides examining how the CBSE portal and payment systems interacted during fee transactions.
“How do those two software talk to each other… how could you minimise those failures? This is what we will go into,” he said.
On the composition of the team, Kamakoti said IIT Madras has deputed two experts — a senior official experienced in large-scale deployment of software and another senior project staff member familiar with data analytics log.
“Similarly, from IIT Kanpur, there are two faculty members,” he said.
Asked about complaints by students that the uploaded answer sheets did not match their handwriting or appeared blurred, Kamakoti said, “We have not still gone to that stage of analysing this.”
The team will examine the answer sheet scanning and uploading process from an IT perspective to see how the mistakes, if any, can be avoided. It will look into it completely and see where things could have gone wrong. It could have been a manual error, he said.
“At some point, there is a manual, to start with. So you basically scan, and then you put the roll number and then upload it. So there is a manual intervention of converting your physical answer script into a digital thing,” he said.
Kamakoti defended the broader idea behind the OMS system, saying it gives students and parents greater visibility into the evaluation process.
“Today, there is an opportunity given by the CBSE to appeal. Now at least I know what has happened to my answer script,” he said.
Calling the system “a great step”, he said it represents “the ultimate transparency you can bring to the system”.
“Any good thing will face some sort of initial issues and we will resolve them,” he said.
According to the IIT Madras director, increased public interest in accessing answer sheets could also have contributed to the portal issues.
“More people would have started looking at it and so hence the bandwidth and internet bandwidth and other things would have become a choke point,” he said.
Drawing from his own experience, Kamakoti said students naturally remain curious about evaluation details.
“I got 99 out of 100 in my 1985 exam. Till today, I am curious why I lost that one mark,” he said.
Kamakoti said access to answer scripts can help parents understand a child’s strengths and thought process better.
“The entire thought process of the child can be understood from the way they have answered a public examination,” he said.
At the same time, Kamakoti cautioned parents against putting additional pressure on students.
“Parents should not do a post-mortem analysis on the paper. They should not say, ‘I invested so much money for your education, can’t you write this answer easily?’ These type of things should not come,” he said.
Asked whether the glitches offered lessons for large-scale digital examinations and the proposed shift of NEET-UG to CBT (computer-based test) mode, Kamakoti said the two systems are different.
“The CBSE is about dissemination of results… So there is a lot of difference between what you see on the CBSE website today and the conduct of a CBT examination,” he said.
“The CBT exam for JEE Mains and JEE Advanced and GATE has been going very well… In the last 10 years, we have been doing computer-based testing for both JEE Advanced and JEE Mains and GATE,” he added.
Kamakoti, however, said the main challenge in shifting NEET-UG to the CBT mode will be the scale of the examination.
“The only challenge is 24 lakh (students) cannot write (an exam) in a single session and the maximum that we have handled so far is around 3 lakh,” he said.
“So if we want 24 lakh to write, then we need to have eight sessions spread over four days on two weekends. So, and then we normalise like how we do in JEE Mains, we normalise the results,” he said.
