Patna: A mock drill of distributing question papers among examinees that will be sent online by the CBSE was conducted on Thursday at the city schools, which would be the centres for CBSE Class X and XII examinations.

Instead of handing out question papers to the examination centres physically, the CBSE is trying out measures of distributing questions to the centres online. "The CBSE has communicated through mail that we have to download multiple set of question papers online and then distribute the papers' printouts among the examinees," said a source.

"A set of three question papers has to be downloaded at the exam centres using a password and then it has to be distributed among the students after taking printouts. The entire process has to be timed. The CBSE headquarters on Thursday sent a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) on the registered email/mobile number of the centre superintendent. The centres had to open the URL and log in by using the password. Even the password was sent to us at a fixed time. The centres were asked to be attentive during a particular time as we were supposed to receive the password at that time. Soon after receiving the password, we had to log in to download the question paper and then we had to take out the printout of the paper," said the source.

The source from the city's one of the CBSE examination centres added that two passwords were given to the centres for accessing two set of question papers.

"We were asked about the time taken to download the question papers and to print them. May be CBSE was checking the time taken so that it could be implemented during the re-examination without hiccups. We were also asked to arrange six high-density printers so that question papers could be printed fast. If there are 600 examinees at one centre, the exam centre is supposed to have at least three high-density printers so that each printer could print at least 200 question papers of at least one complete set," added the source.

People associated with the exam centres said they didn't find the procedure feasible. "Our school has two high-density printers but not all centres have it. From where will they arrange high-density printers and also what if any technical error occurs while printing question papers on the exam day? These need to be given a second thought," she said.

The process also requires a good manpower so that question papers could be distributed on time after completing the previous procedures.

"Through the drill we got an idea that we would require at least five to six people who would have to be engaged in stapling the question papers when the printouts would be taken out," said the source.