Software change led to SSLC mess

KOCHI: While Education Minister Abdu Rabb and officials of the department differed on the cause of the mess that followed the declaration of SSLC results, an investigation by Deccan Chronicle has revealed that the department’s callousness in replacing a fully-functional software with an untested one resulted in the chaos.  

Sources associated with the process said the department had in 2014 introduced direct online uploading of marks from valuation camps with the help of a software developed by a system manager in Pareeksha Bhavan.

It helped the department declare the results in record time with no glitches. However, the Pareeksha Bhavan chose to discard it in favour of a new one, developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), for the 2015 examinations.

The sources said the problem associated with the software had surfaced when the data entry process began in January. It worsened when teachers in the valuation camps started entering marks.

“Most of the data entry operators were teachers themselves,” said the sources. “While one teacher made the first entry of a mark, another teacher made the second entry of the same mark from another computer.

Only if the two matched will the system accept it and forward it for a third checking by the score supervisor. Otherwise it will remain as a mismatch in the system.

The Pareeksha Bhavan won’t be able to upload such results if the software works perfectly. However, here because of the inherent problem in the software the results went into the network with the errors.” In some valuation centres there was a big difference between the total numbers of first entries and second entries.

DPI Gopalakrishna Bhat and Pareeksha Bhavan secretary M I Sukumaran, however, chose to blame it on the people who entered data. “It is surprising that the mistakes crept in despite the three levels of inspection.

Altogether 2,436 error cases have been identified and we have now collected the correct entry of 1000 students. The rest will be collected soon and the problem will be rectified in one or two days,” said Mr Bhat.

The sources, however, said that if the senior officials tried to address the issue as a problem of human error, it will confound it, leading to more troubles. Education Minister P K Abdu Rabb reiterated on Wednesday said that software error had caused the trouble.