The higher secondary students of Class XII who write the third semester examinations conducted by the board in September, will get to see the scanned copy of their OMR sheets on the council’s website for an independent scrutiny before the publication of results.

The council split the Plus-II courses into four semesters last year.

The first and second semesters are for students in Class XI. The third and fourth semesters are for Class XII students. While the students are to be tested entirely on MCQs in the first and third semester examinations, they will be tested on short-answer type and descriptive type questions in the second and fourth semesters.

Schools have conducted the first two semesters; the council will conduct the third and fourth semesters.

The council decided this on Monday. Alleged irregularities in the assessment of the OMR by the school service commission for the appointment of schoolteachers prompted the move, said Chiranjib Bhattacharjee, the president of the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.

“We will have the scanned images of OMR sheets on which the candidates will write the third-semester exams, uploaded on the council’s website. The candidates must submit their registration number and OTP (one-time password) to log in and view the scanned OMR copy on the council’s student portal. The candidates can go through the scanned images before the results are published,” said Bhattacharjee.

The council will also publish the model answer keys.

“There will be a certain window period during which a student can challenge the model answers. The experts will review the challenges. The exercise will be completed before the evaluation of the scripts starts. We want to be transparent in our evaluation process,” Bhattacharjee told Metro.

Students will be tested entirely on multiple-choice
questions in the third-semester examination, which is scheduled to commence on September 8.

Bhattacharjee said they had two options — either a carbon copy of the OMR sheets or scanned images uploaded on the council’s website.

“In case we went with the carbon copy of OMRs, a candidate would have got the copy instantly. However, we decided against it and chose to upload scanned images of OMRs after completion of the exams on September 22,” said Bhattacharjee.

He said the URL links of the scanned copies of each subject will be uploaded
on the students’ portal of the council.