HC instructs WBJEE Board to show OMR sheets to students

A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed at the Calcutta High Court after Millennium Post on June 16 reported about the issue. The articale mentioned that confusion would prevail among thousands of medical aspirants who will appear in the state medical entrance examination scheduled on July 20 as WBJEE Board had decided not to show the OMR sheets and answer key of the candidates.

Dr AK Maity, an expert in the field had also written to the state education minister Partha Chatterjee pointing out the adverse effect of the decision earlier taken by the board not to upload the OMR sheets of the candidates. He said that most of the states and boards are now uploading the OMR sheets which not only bring transparency but also rectify the errors done by the board while evaluating the answers. In West Bengal too the method was adopted three years ago.

Keeping in view the interest of the students, the Calcutta High Court on Friday ordered the WBJEE Board to upload the OMR sheets of the candidates and the answer keys, following which the board has announced to upload the OMR sheets and model answer keys for 24 hours on August 9 and the results for the examination will be published between August 21-27.

It may be mentioned that for the last three years, the board has been uploading the OMR sheets and answer key for all candidates so that they can verify their answers. The OMR sheets were available on the website for about 48 hours for the students to see where they had committed mistakes and what marks they would get.

 This not only helped the candidates, but also, the Joint board would get an opportunity to rectify their mistakes. The candidates could also check their OMR sheets with the answer key, which contained all the right answers for the questions.

Around three days prior to the uploading of OMR sheets and answer keys the board used to upload the list of answers to check whether they were correctly done. This because, almost every year there were some mistakes on the part of the WBJEE Board while selecting the accurate answer and they were later rectified as per the suggestions of the students and their guardians.

After this the OMR sheets were checked in respect to the list of corrected answers and then they were uploaded for the students.

But this year the WBJEE Board decided not to upload the answer key prior to the uploading of the OMR sheets for the rectification. A list of answers will be uploaded with OMR sheets but there will be hardly any chance of rectification of mistakes, if there are any.