The traditional system of marking saw the teacher being sent two or three bundles of some 300 scripts by an examination board or university. They would also assign a head examiner to his services from some other college or university.

The teacher would post via registered cover a test instalment of 15 to 20 marked scripts to the head examiner. The head examiner scrutinised and advised, accordingly, a sub-examiner about his assessment of the scripts. That advice on the part of the head examiner would be standard, which all sub-examiners followed in their marking. So the students in general would receive their rightful and uniform results from the examiners. The weak ones would get poor marks and the brilliant first-class marks.

There were faults in this traditional system of marking. Firstly, thanks to postal services, a lot of time, months even, would be spent in the sending and receiving of the packets of scripts. Second, the scripts would sometimes be lost in transit. Third, the announcing of results would take longer. Fourth, one would sometimes succeed in knowing where and to whom the scripts of a certain subject had been sent for marking. Many of the parents in the hope of getting them more marks would then travel to far off places with a sifarish in search of their son or daughter's scripts.

The usefulness of this system of marking scripts, however, was that the assessment would be, to a greater extent, accurate. The candidates in most cases would not complain about the award of marks.

The recently-adopted system of centralised marking, too, has its faults and benefits. The first fault is that since the teachers in a team of markers are on holiday, they often work hurriedly to get back to their homes as early as possible. The other is that they mark as many packets of scripts as they can in order to earn a bulkier remuneration. And they are bound to commit mistakes in all this rush.

This way a candidate, who may have copied excerpts from some English newspaper, might get away with getting good marks in that paper.

Once an examiner was seen, marking English scripts, using a red ballpoint, ticking the answers on the pages from bottom to top, which was rather amusing, and at the same time unfortunate. He was just playing with the students' future.

The BA/BSc annual examination 2010 of the University of Peshawar this time has not had centralised script marking as was the norm. Due to the month of Ramazan, the scripts were marked extraordinarily fast. According to a news report, some 40,000 students failed with many others receiving fewer marks than what they deserved. The governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who is also the university's chancellor, has been requested to take immediate action against the hurriedly-declared BA/BSc results. It is really not possible to mark the scripts of more than 50,000 candidates in just 25 days, which is what happened here.

Centralised system of marking is the need of the hour as quick results are expected from all sides. But the system needs improvement. Firstly, it should be ensured that a particular group of examiners should not always be called for marking; one can go through the records to know that very often some particular cliques have worked in centralised marking. There are teachers and professors, who are more competent in their respective subjects and who are experienced enough in marking but who have never seen the offices of the controllers. Someone should take the trouble to call them for marking, particularly for the BA/BSc scripts.

The controllers of universities should contact the principals of colleges well in advance for receiving a list of recommended professors for marking. Script marking should not be left to the whim of controllers. The principals know who are good and bad at their work, and who can serve as competent markers and exam conductors.

The writer is assistant professor at the Government Postgraduate College, Charsadda.

mohammadfayyaz@live.com