The Telangana exam fiasco necessitates a fresh review of all the papers

When the school-leaving certificate remains the most important outcome for a student at the end of a dozen years of study, governments have a duty to ensure that it is accurate. The serious errors in the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education results this year, which have triggered 21 student suicides, show that policymakers and the bureaucracy can badly fail at meeting their responsibilities. A few hundred students were declared absent and passed, without their marks being displayed, and in other cases, as absent and failed, although the candidates had taken the examination. In one case, apparently caused by human error, the student’s marks statement recorded a zero, when in fact she had scored 99. The State-appointed inquiry committee that went into the examinations issue has pointed to errors on the part of the company that was chosen to handle the results, notably absence of checks on the system’s performance and sufficient trials of the software application to assess its robustness. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has ordered free reverification of the papers, but the government’s major concern should be the restoration of public confidence. It should review all the papers and make them available to candidates for scrutiny without any fee.

Among the issues raised after the Telangana fiasco is whether the private agency selected to process the results could handle the scale of the operation. This year, over 8.7 lakh candidates took the Intermediate examination, and the inquiry has determined that there was no significant variation in the pass percentage in some of the difficult subjects, compared with 2018. But the agency contracted to do the processing had encountered problems with data even during the collection of fees, which should have led to rigorous scrutiny of the technology. There was also a lack of understanding among examiners, since some errors were traced to wrong entries in machine-readable forms. Independent verification, review of results and future preparedness are now being pursued, but many families have lost loved ones and others have been deeply traumatised. It is imperative that all school boards learn from Telangana’s mistakes. The tragic consequence of examination muddles is a spate of student suicides. This distressing annual phenomenon is witnessed in many States, but governments have not addressed it with any degree of alarm. Students should be counselled at school that marks in the final examination are not the sole determinants of success. Policymakers should follow up such an assurance by creating more opportunities for all youth to acquire life-building skills that match their aptitude. Such counselling can also help parents, who view school-leaving marks as the make-or-break numbers for a child. A proper examination is important, but in a diversified, growing economy, sound learning and job skills hold the key to securing the future.