MU Committee puts the ball in software firm’s court for chaos in results

MU Committee puts the ball in software firm’s court for chaos in results

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangaluru, March 30, 2016 : A committee submitted its seven-page report of March 23, 2016 to the Vice-Chancellor on March 28, Monday. Seven-member committee appointed by K. Byrappa, Vice-Chancellor of Mangalore University, to find out how “errors, mistakes and lapses” in the results of undergraduate examinations conducted during November-December 2015, occurred has said that a company that provided the examination software to the university “is wholly unaware of the valuation process”.

“While the company adopted newer methods, the evaluators were not apprised of these methods went ahead with the old style of evaluation,” the committee, comprising senior professors and two Syndicate members, said.  The committee found that the data pertaining to admissions and examinations were held by two different software companies.   Though the Registrar (Evaluation) felt that it was a “transitional” problem, the committee said, “There is more to it than what meets the eye.”

Cautioning the university against hiring the software of commercial software companies for examination process, the committee said that the university should have its own integrated software to have a complete control over its data.  The report said and added that it was very “dangerous to hand over the examination and admission data to a commercial company and then be at its mercy.”

Referring to the technical aspects, the panel said that the software company handled two different answer books and the old answer book was not compatible.

As a result, some of the old answer books might have missed the code number. “It appears that the company was prepared only for the odd-semester examination and when the decision was taken by the university to conduct supplementary semester examination also, the company did not have the new answer books. Using old answer books led to confusion during codification.

It said that the software company appears to have generated the code number randomly.

“As a result, a stack of answer scripts given to the evaluators perhaps, had random code numbers on them, while the OMR sheet did not match the sequence of numbers printed on the answer books. There appears to have been a mismatch between the answer scripts and the marks entered for them on the OMR sheet,” it said.  Finally the sufferers are the poor students who in spite of all action are yet to get justice.