Bhubaneswar, Jan. 14: Information technology experts fear that the ambitious e-evaluation project being planned by the higher education department this year would turn out to be “disastrous”.

With hardly six weeks remaining for the Plus Two exams, the department of higher education continues to remain undecided about the implementation of the initiative. While the authorities have repeated that the new system will certainly be implemented this year, IT officials, who have been implementing various automation projects of the higher education department in the past, feel that it would be an extremely risky affair.

The department is yet to bring out advertisements inviting tenders, which is a time-taking process and is done according to the procedures and rules laid down by the government. As of now there are three agencies that can carry out the e-evaluation initiative. These include OCAC (Odisha Computer Application Centre), OKCL (Odisha Knowledge Corporation Limited) and the NIC (National Informatics Centre).

While OCAC has the experience of conducting the e-admissions through Student Academic Management System, the OKCL had recently conducted the e-evaluation for the BEd entrance exams.

Similarly, the NIC, which has been implementing several e-governance activities in the state, can also implement the process. Technical experts suggested that the department should ideally start the e-valuation in a phase-wise manner.

“It can conduct e-evaluation for just the supplementary exam or the vocational exams for this year. The errors in the implementation can be studied and next year we can minimise the mistake,” said a senior official.

The governments should never think of having e-evaluation for all the candidates, else it would turn out to be a huge mess that will be disastrous, he said.

“Our inexperience and rush to implement it can ruin the future of so many students. The wise thing will be to implement it in phases,” said a senior official at one of these agencies.

Council of Higher Secondary Education (CHSE) chairman Basudev Chattoi said that he had received no information regarding the e-admission from the department. “We will do whatever the department directs us to do,” he said.

CHSE employees, as in the past, have criticised the decision of the state government to go for e-evaluation and have threatened a protest.

Above all, e-evaluation will require a massive training of evaluators, which is impossible during this brief span. Besides trained teachers, it would require an on site trainer at every evaluation centre to look into the problems during the execution, the hiring for which is yet to take place.

Gagan Kumar Dhal, principal secretary higher education, reiterated that the department was in constant touch with department of information technology, which would shortly provide a list of agencies that could be involved in the project.

A budgetary allocation of Rs 5 crore for conducting e-valuation this academic calendar has been made, he said.

The e-evaluation exercise will require the answer sheets to be scanned and then uploaded to computer software. The teachers would evaluate these papers online.

The only silver lining in the entire exercise is the Plus Two database of students that was made during the e-admission process.

“However, for the remaining 35 per cent work, the time of six weeks looks too insufficient,” said the official.