PESHAWAR: The Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE), Peshawar, has decided to start mechanical checking of examination papers so as to eliminate cheating and use of unfair means in the examinations, according to officials.

Technically named as ‘Optical Mark Recognizer’ or OMR base marking the new system would be applied to 20 per cent of each paper and launched in the upcoming supplementary intermediate examinations starting from Oct 13.

The OMR marking system would be for the students of Peshawar, Charsadda, Khyber and Mohmand agencies, and Frontier Region, Peshawar, because the board is only responsible to conduct examinations in these areas. Currently, the mechanical checking of papers is adopted only by the Lahore education board and Institute of Business Administration, Sukkur.

In the first phase, the OMR base marking would be applied to only multiple choice questions (MCQs) carrying 20 of total 100 marks of each paper, BISE chairman Dr Mohammad Shafi Afridi told Dawn. It would be formally launched in the forthcoming intermediate supplementary examinations, he said.

Board chairman says initially new system will be applied to MCQs in papers

The chairman said that the pattern of MCQs would be redesigned for the OMR marking.

“As the mechanical checking is a new trend to be introduced by the Peshawar board, we would gradually switch over from the manual to the mechanical checking of papers,” Mr Afridi said. After the successful execution of the first phase, he said that the next phase would be 40 per cent checking through OMR.

The board administration has planned to change 70 to 80 per cent of the existing pattern of question papers by converting to the MCQs while remaining 20 to 30 per cent would be essay type to improve writing skills of the students, officials working on the project told Dawn.

Checking of papers through OMR would eliminate the decades’ old menace of cheating and use of unfair means during examination and paper checking, they said. Maximum transparency would be ensured and the rights of students would not be usurped, they said.

The officials said that thousands of papers could be checked in a day through the OMR base marking as the machines installed in the BISE, Peshawar, had the capacity to check 3,500 examination papers per hour. The switching over from the manual to mechanical checking would be completed by 2018.

They said that there would be no chance of cheating in the examination halls as five to six different types of papers of the same subject would be given to the students. They said that a student would not know which type of paper had been given to the student sitting adjacent to him. They said that more transparency would be ensured as the students would be able to check their solved papers on the board website.

They said that the board administration would also conduct a mock exercise in some schools in coming few days to remove any flaws in the system and to educate the schools’ headmasters about it.

The officials said that several meetings had been held with the headmasters who would educate their students about the new marking system, while private students would be sent guidelines in Urdu with their roll numbers.

They said that the examination staff would reach the hall half an hour before the scheduled time to tell the students how to solve MCQs. Currently, the result preparation takes three months, but with the full implementation of the OMR base marking it would take less than a month, they said.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play