London, April 25: This is proving to be a testing time for school examiners in Britain who have decided to outsource one-word answers on some papers to India for computer inputting so they can be marked up quickly in Britain.

This latest and rather novel example of outsourcing has been undertaken by a major examination board, Assessment and Qualification Alliance (AQA), which has been satisfied with a pilot run and is planning to send information on 500,000 papers to India this summer.

The papers are for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), usually taken at the age of 16, in History, French, German and Italian.

Although no actual marking will be done in India but merely inputting, there was an immediate row over AQA?s plans.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said AQA?s plan was a ?desperate way to hold up a sinking system?.

He commented: ?The government has rejected proposals to reform exams, which would have rescued the situation. Instead, we are facing more years of examination overload with all the marking problems that go with it.?

The GCSE exam scripts are being sent to India as part of a new computer marking process this year.

A spokesman for AQA played down fears that the new system would be vulnerable to problems and delays, insisting that the first time it was used, marking was completed early. Computer marking aims to make processing exam papers faster and more efficient.

The way it will work is that the pupils? complete exam scripts are scanned into a computer file by the company managing AQA?s computer marking, Milton Keynes-based Data and Research Services.

Candidates? answers are then divided up between questions requiring longer responses and those with just one-word answers.

The scanned one-word answers are e-mailed to offices in India where workers type them up so they can be marked by a computer programme back in the UK, AQA said.

The spokesman explained: ?There?s no marking taking place in India, just keying-in.?

AQA said each single-word answer would be typed in by two people and any discrepancies would be picked up by the computer programme and investigated.

The other longer answers will all be marked by expert markers rather than computer, he said. ?These expert markers will all be based in England.? The contract is worth ?2 million to India.

It is claimed that there have already been problems with the first batch. A former employee at the company handling the process for AQA said there have been delays in returning the papers, causing panic that the system will collapse.

?If there are delays when we send out a few thousand papers what will happen in the summer when half a million go out?? However, in January, answers to the board?s module in GCSE French listening were put through this same process.

The AQA spokesman commented: ?There were absolutely no problems and the marking was completed ahead of schedule.?

The problem has arisen because British boards find it increasingly difficult to recruit reliable examiners.

The AQA spokesman examiner assured The Telegraph today that the process of marking had been speeded up. The idea of using India for computer inputting had been thought by the Data and Research Services.

He predicted that other exam boards were likely to follow AQA for papers requiring one-word answers, allowing examiners in Britain to spend more time marking those who had longer answers ?such as essays?.