Students rejoice outside a matriculation examination centre on Monday. Picture by Badrika Nath Das

Cuttack, March 10: The Board of Secondary Education has made a two-tier arrangement for “error-free” evaluation of answer sheets of students, who appeared in the matriculation examination.

Around 16,000 teachers and 1,200 chief examiners have been appointed for this purpose.

The evaluation process, which will start from March 21, will be carried out at 61 centres across the state.

The board has aims to publish the results early by completing the evaluation process by March 31. Strict instructions have been issued to avoid erratic evaluation and improper marking.

Nearly six lakh students had taken the High School Certificate examination that ended today while the matriculation examination for ex-regular students will end tomorrow.

“We have already despatched the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets to the computer firm while the evaluation of the 50-mark subjective papers will start from March 21,” said board president D.P. Nanda.

Nanda said the OMR sheets of the first three subjects had already reached the board’s office while the process of bringing the OMR and answer sheets for the remaining subjects would start tomorrow.

Students welcomed the board’s move to introduce the OMR sheets (50 marks) this year.

“The matric examination with OMR sheets was good, because we saved a lot of time which helped us go through our papers and rectify the mistakes in the subjective papers,” said Om Prakash Dash, a student.

Besides, the board intends to save nearly Rs 20 lakh by the transporting the OMR sheets and answer booklets by road instead of the post. Earlier, the board spent nearly Rs 1 crore towards bringing the answer sheets to the respective evaluation centres through the railway mail service. Sources said the evaluation process got delayed earlier because it had taken nearly 15 days to transport the answer sheets through the postal system.

Concerns were also being raised after lots of answer sheets had been found dumped at Cuttack railway station without any security last year.

A board official said adequate measures were being taken for timely publication of the results. Instead of publishing division and top 100 list, the students will be awarded A1 (above 90 marks), A2 (above 80 and below 90), B1 (70-80), B2 (60-70), C (50-60), D (40-50), E (33-40) and grade F (less than 33 per cent marks).

The students securing F grade will have to take the examination again.