All hail to the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing disclosure of evaluated answer sheets of any public or professional examination to students under the purview of the RTI Act! Now this I say, is some real good work! A Bench of Justice AK Patnaik and RV Raveendran upheld the order of Calcutta High Court regarding disclosure of answer sheets to the students stating that answer sheets come under the purview of “information” as defined in the RTI Act!
Talking from personal experience of a nerd who perhaps slogged her hours mugging for the CBSE Board Examinations and yet landing up with marks below expectations, a step such as this would be just enough to satiate my curiosity regarding “where I went wrong” or perhaps “where they (examiners) went wrong”! Additionally, if I was planning to give my answer sheets for re evaluation, I would be more sure about the need for a re evaluation after knowing what really went wrong with my answers.
It is understandable why the major examination bodies in the country such as CBSE, ICAI, West Bengal Board of Secondary Education etc are denouncing such a step. Given the corrupted ways in which examination papers are often checked (or half un-checked), provision of such lousy work done by examiners would reflect the sheer incompetency of our examination system. Answer sheets of students are evaluated by different examiners. Although the Education Boards prescribe certain guidelines of evaluation, the evaluation in its real sense is quite subjective. Provision of answer sheets to students would open the evaluation by examiners to close scrutiny by teachers as well as facilitate comparison between the evaluations by different teachers. If the subjectivity in evaluation is challengeable in the courts, the number of suits filed against each examiner remains to be seen! But then of course we can be sure that this in turn would force the examiners to be objective in their evaluation.
Such a step would also perhaps provide respite to the students of Janaki Devi College who appeared for the Delhi University examinations this year in May and are re appearing for the same examinations in August owing to the fact that the University’s examination department suddenly decided to lose the evaluated answer sheets before entering the marks in their database!
However, I cannot help but be critical regarding the implementation of such a decision. Such a decision would have a two way impact: Provision of Information and Use of Information. Both these areas are of crucial importance and need a thought.
Given the fact that the public examination system is not very trustworthy in our country, a multitude of students would be filing RTI Applications demanding what is now their rightful information! This would not only lead to excessive pressure on the providers of information who also have an upper limit with regard to the time span in which the information is provided. Also, how feasible is it for a student who demands answer sheets of an examination taken by him/her in 1999 in the year 2011 to get what he asked for? How feasible is it for the Education Boards to preserve all such answer sheets for ages on an end? Is it not perhaps a better idea to set a limit as to the number of years after taking an examination should you be entitled to ask for the answer sheets?
Taking a slight detour here, a lot of problems mentioned above would perhaps not even occur if each such issue was not put under the ambiguous purview of “information” in the RTI Act, not highlighting individually how each kind of information should be dealt with. Talking about the use of information, such a drastic step would undoubtedly create chaos and havoc in the examination departments of all the Education Boards and the judicial courts, especially if the students decided to sue the examiners on behalf of examination papers evaluated by them in the past. Clarifications regarding suit against examiners in such a case would perhaps work in favor of the apex court which passed the decision!
Summing up, as a student and as someone who is very close to the RTI Act I am pretty excited about the Supreme Court’s decision of making evaluated answer sheets available under the purview of the RTI Act. Such a decision would inevitably sure create havoc for the courts and the Education departments. However, if taken in the stride this step can help generate greater accountability of the examiners directly to the students, the major risk bearers in this case. Greater accountability would inevitably imply greater efficiency.
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