Fri. Mar 29th, 2024
By Hindustan Times

Months ahead of the paper leak, CBSE has come up with its first major reform that marks a collaboration with Microsoft. Last exam season was marked by the heavy criticism that came CBSE’s way after the class 10 mathematics paper and the class 12 economics paper were leaked followed by the protests and retests.

The Central Board of Secondary Education overlooks 20,299 schools across the country and the combined outrage has triggered the board into introducing major reforms. In this partnership with Microsoft, CBSE will be employing an encrypted security solution for software copies of question papers. This will be in use after a period of 3 months after passing security tests.

Anil Bhansali, MD, Microsoft India (R&D) and Corporate Vice President, Cloud Enterprise said in a telephonic interview that, “We have developed for CBSE an innovative solution which makes question papers leak-proof until 30 minutes prior to the start of the examinations.”

“But if the question papers get leaked after they are allowed to download (just half an hour before the start of the exam) due to some bad actors, the system allows easy traceability as question paper for each center are watermarked,” Bhansali added.

In an effort to forward their collaboration, CBSE and Microsoft have been conducting pilot test runs on their software. The first run was successfully completed in July for a digital question paper generation across 487 centers for the compartment examinations of class 10.  

The system has features for preventing leaks. The Controller of Examinations will be given access to track the entirety of the process using simple software built on Windows 10 and Office 365.

The software is encrypted and a two-factor authentication process is a prerequisite to log into the program. This way examiners will have to provide their identification before they can download the question papers. Moreover, they will be only allowed to download 30 minutes prior to the beginning of the exam.

Bhansali stated that “the system allows various authentication process. For example, it can be OTP (one-time password) based or biometric based. It is up to the clients what two authentication process they want to choose. The authentication can even be Aadhaar-based.”

One of the interesting features includes the use of the watermarking facility available in Office 365 to encrypt papers. Each center has its individual watermark and the center code is imprinted on it. It allows localization and traceability in the event of a paper leak.

A CBSE administer is required to initiate the distribution of the examination papers which in turn sends an email to the respective centers with a link to their OneDrive, a file hosting Microsoft service.

The digitization process is going to be successful in securing the system and is expected to save large amounts of time, costs, and resources expended by the examination administrators due to online paper generation, automated delivery process and reduction in approval cycles.

Bhansali concluded “the system that we have developed for CBSE can be easily replicated for other boards or examination administrators. We will be happy to share it with other central or state authorities that conduct examinations for various purposes.”

By malika

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