Officials from the board are planning to move Supreme Court to maintain the confidentiality of the evaluated answer sheets, citing technical difficulties.
Total transparency in the student evaluation process in state schools may take some time to take off. The Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education has dug in its heels over not making answer sheets public despite a state information commission (SIC) ruling that they are not confidential documents.
Officials from the board are planning to move Supreme Court to maintain the confidentiality of the evaluated answer sheets, citing technical difficulties.
“We have decided not to show evaluated answer sheets to students. We are planning to move Supreme Court,’’ board secretary TN Supe said. “There are some technicalities involved, which we have to sort out,’’ he added.
In a landmark judgment in July 2009, the SIC had maintained that evaluated answer sheets were not confidential and that these could be obtained by filing an RTI application. The ruling came on an appeal by HSC student Abhijeet Joshi before Pune information commissioner Vijay Kuvalekar.
Following this ruling, the state board chairperson, Vijaysheela Sardesai, had told DNA that the board was planning to allow SSC/HSC students to have a look at their answer sheets. She had said that the plan would be made applicable from the academic year 2010-11 after receiving a report from a panel set up to examine the ruling.
However, the Pune divisional board challenged Kuvalekar’s decision in the high court. The court ordered a stay on the decision and the matter is pending. The board decided to move the apex court after the Nagpur information commissioner passed a similar order recently.
“The information commissioner’s ruling is against the service and discipline of the board. We trust our examiners who check the answer sheets. We are sure that the evaluators do justice to the answer scripts that they check,” a top official of the board, which is headquartered in Pune, said.
A section of the board officials had earlier mulled showing copies of evaluated answer sheets to students, but it ran into practical problems.
According to a former board official, the Maharashtra State Board Regulations states that the answer sheet is a confidential document. “It is like a contract signed between the student and examiner. If there are some discrepancies reported in the paper, the examiner, the moderator and the chief moderator will not remain confidential, which by law should be maintained,” said the official.
The board sent a team to Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, to study how the system — already in place in these states — works in order to work out a way to smoothen the process. While the team has submitted a report to the board, there has been no progress on the matter.
— With inputs from Gitesh Shelke from Pune
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