On-Screen Marking System (OSM) service provider MeritTrac Services, under fire for the fiasco at Mumbai University in which results were delayed, blamed the shortage of MU evaluators, lack of co-ordination between stakeholders and MU’s own processing programme for tabulating results after evaluation.
Responding to a questionnaire sent by The Hindu , the Bangalore-based service provider, which claims to be the country’s largest private testing and assessment company , said its role in MU was restricted to digitising answer scripts, making them available on the server, enabling evaluation through authorised computers and sharing scores with the university after evaluation. This, it says, is roughly 25% of the work involved in the evaluation process.
Nagendran Sundarajan, executive vice-president, MeritTrac, said, “Under ideal conditions, the evaluation process should have lagged the availability of answer scripts in the server by just one week to 10 days. Unfortunately, teachers’ availability hampered the progress of evaluation process. Evaluation for some of the last few programmes were extended by the university till September 2017.”
Mr. Sundarajan added that some of the most critical activities, including tabulation of results, incorporating internal assessment marks, assigning overall weightage were not part of MeritTrac’s scope of work. “This is where most of the delays occurred. The university, through its own result-processing programme, checks for attendance and other rules involved before sending it to its website and processing unit for printing mark sheets.”
‘We’re totally capable’
Refuting allegations that it was unable to handle a large-scale operation like the one at MU, MeritTrac said its platform is capable of handling up to one lakh evaluations per day, which is beyond MU’s requirement.
It also denied allegations that it was unable to handle supplements taken by students beyond 40 pages in the main answer sheets. A company representative said, “We have no issues in digitising even 1,000 pages, but the supplements will have to be logically tagged to the main answer script through appropriate or unique bar codes, or through a back-end system of unique seat numbers by the university. The scope of printing the blank answer scripts, allocating bar codes series, seat numbers are under the university.”
It also brushed aside allegations that 3,000 answer sheets went missing during the first semester exams in this academic year due to its negligence. “At all points of time, the answer scripts were kept only within the university premises. So, there was no question of MeritTrac losing the answer scripts. MeritTrac team was only given access in to the university premises to do the scanning activity. These premises were always under the supervision of the university security personnel.”
Dr Ashok Yende, director, Mumbai Law Academy at MU, said, “Yes, there was some non-cooperation by evaluators this year due to then-VC Sanjay Deshmukh’s decision to introduce OSM just before the exams. It’s also a fact that evaluators sat through slow downloads, had wrong answer sheets opening on screens and other technical problems. Yes, there is a shortage of evaluators for courses like Law, since most are part-timers. This issue had always been there, and manually evaluated results were faster despite such issues.”
A company official added, “MeritTrac is just one element in the larger ecosystem. The university has to bring entities together, drive the process and manage their internal moving parts. Ensuring speed and timelines of evaluation would ensure faster turnaround time.”
