To avoid ghost students, ghost writers, and ghost colleges, and bring in transparency, the State government has decided to implement ‘end-to-end digital examination system’ for the semester exams of Nursing and paramedical courses.
The new system has digital evaluation and sending question papers digitally, among other measures. The government is planning to implement the new system from 2023-24.
The Directorate of Medical Education has submitted a detailed project report to the government in this regard and the process of permission for tender is under progress.
“In the last two years, we had lot of allegations and irregularities in the Nursing and paramedical examinations in the State. Many colleges have been violating the rules and regulations of the government and ghost students, ghost colleges, ghost writers, and malpractices are common in these examinations. Therefore, to prevent all these irregularities and bring transparency, we decided to implement end-to-end digital examination system in the State,” said B.L. Sujatha Rathod, Director, Directorate of Medical Education.
With nursing and paramedical colleges having mushroomed across the State, most private nursing colleges are targeting out-of-State students and selling seats at exorbitant rates. There is also a problem of fake students, students appearing only for the exam without attending the college, ghost students writing the exam, mass copying, and other examination malpractices.
The High Court of Karnataka had recently ordered a private nursing college in Kalaburagi to pay a compensation of ₹10 lakh each to 10 students whom it enrolled by fraud. A suspected fake bill scam had also been reported at Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS), with four nursing colleges allegedly generating dubious receipts for affiliation fees.
To prevent all these irregularities, the Central government has made Common Entrance Test (CET) compulsory for Nursing admission across the country from 2023-24. The Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) successfully completed the Nursing admission through CET this year.
As a continuation of this, the State government has decided to implement the ‘end-to-end digital examination system’ for Nursing and paramedical courses.
What’s new?
As a part of the new system, the government will create a separate login ID for each student. All the information, including examination, admission, fee and others, will be shared with the students through this ID only.
Instead of sending the admission tickets to the college principal, the digital admission tickets will be sent to the student’s login IDs. Then, students will download the admission tickets and attend the examination.
To avoid question paper leakage and other malpractices, the Directorate of Medical Examination has decided to send the digitised question papers to the college principal concerned on the day of the examination. Then, the authorities will download, print and distribute them to the students.
Digital evaluation is a major part of the end-to-end digital examination system. After the theory examination, all the answer sheets will be scanned and converted to digital. Then, evaluators will conduct the evaluation of these answer sheets on computers. This will also help in announcing the results early, officials said.
“The end-to-end digital examination system is nothing but a completely digitised monitoring system. It will start with the process of admission tickets, student identification and end with digital evaluation. The digital evaluation system is the biggest process and it needs a separate high-end software and computer system. We have submitted the detailed project report to the government for permission for the tendering. We are planning to introduce this new system from this academic year,” Dr. Rathod explained.
