E-marking assessment plan misses the light of day

Lack of machinery, trained staff has halted progress of digital grading plan ahead of the matric, inter examinations

KARACHI:

In order to boost its popular appeal, each provincial government boastfully announces novel endeavours aimed at upgrading and streamlining the conduct of public affairs however, a lack of effective planning and implementation on part of the organizing departments consistently thwarts the initiatives from timely reaching fruition.

During the tenure of the caretaker government last year, the School Education and Literacy Department had announced the introduction of the e-marking system at the matriculation and intermediate levels in Sindh for the academic year 2024-2025, for which the required machinery worth millions of rupees also been procured. Unfortunately, the staff required for operating the purchased machinery could not receive the relevant training in time, landing the project in a deadlock just days before the board examinations were expected to commence.

“The e-marking scheme will not be in effect this academic year since the teachers and examiners have not received any manuals or training sessions on how to operate the machinery. Therefore, the multiple choice questions (MCQ’s) will be printed on a plain paper instead of the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheet and will also be marked manually,” disclosed an officer from the Board of Intermediate Education Sindh.

On a separate note, sources have also revealed that the machinery which has been provided to the Board of Secondary Education by the School Education and Literacy Department for e-marking is in such small numbers that even after their activation by trained staff, e-marking can only be done for the results of a few hundred students only.

"The machinery that has been given to us is too little to be useful. We have more than 100,000 students in the matriculation and inter exams. What can we do with these few hundred scanners?,” questioned the Chairman of the Board of Secondary Education.

The chairman’s objections were an understatement of the kind of disparity that exists between the number of machines and the millions of students who appear for the board examinations each year. Apparently, 500,000 students from matriculation and intermediate sit for the board examinations from Karachi alone, while another 100,000 take the examinations from Hyderabad but only two servers, two or three printers, and a few cameras have been provided for the boards in both the cities.

When questioned on the matter, Arif Jalbani, Acting IT Manager at the Higher Secondary Education Board, Karachi said, "We have procured some machines and might order more in the future.”

It should be noted that in the meeting held about a week ago in the presence of the Sindh Education Minister and the Minister of Universities and Boards for reviewing the preparations for the annual examinations in Sindh, there were talks about starting e-marking in Sindh, but the relevant ministers were not informed that currently no preparations have been made in this regard.

This is in spite of the fact that the Department of School Education had formally set up a separate office at Clifton for managing the logistics of the e-marking project with the support of the Asian Development Bank.

Reports now claim that from May 6th onwards the training of examiners will commence in Karachi, but it will not come in handy during the upcoming matriculation and intermediate examination session beginning May 7th and May 28th respectively.

Speaking to the Express Tribune on the delay in the e-marking project, Rizwan Soomro, Head of the Sindh Secondary Education Improvement Project said, "The OMR and e-marking system will be put into practice from 2025 onwards. It is as per schedule and there is no delay. The equipment has been delivered and the training sessions have begun.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2024.