Reforms in exams: What the protest by CA students on ICAI exams is all about

Hundreds of students sat on their second day of protests against the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) on Tuesday, demanding their right to get their answer sheets revalued. The students were also supported by a few qualified chartered accountants, who conduct CA coaching classes. Their demand is for the ICAI to increase transparency in the paper correction process.

The protests which began on Monday sought ICAI to amend Regulation 39(4) of the Chartered Accountants Act of 1949. According to the existing regulation, students cannot use his or her copy of answer paper to demand revaluation of the answers by ICAI. It means that while the student can demand a re-totalling of marks in his answer paper copy, he or she cannot expect the ICAI to examine the merit of not awarding marks for a particular answer.

Neeraj Arora, a CA educator, published a video on his YouTube channel around a week ago, prompting the ICAI to undertake reforms in the evaluation system of the institute. He said that he was raising the issue at this juncture because this was when the ICAI is sending out copies of inspected answer papers to students who had applied for them and uploading ‘Suggested Answers’ to the May 2019 exams on its website.

Though the ICAI announced reforms in evaluation of answer books of CA exams on September 21, faculty members and students slammed the reforms, calling it vague and non-transparent.

Based on the vague reforms announced by the ICAI, faculty members like Neeraj Arora and Parveen Sharma called ICAI’s system unfair and requested the students to join them on a protest in front of its Delhi office demanding a fair evaluation system. Inspired by this, students in places like Durgapur, Siliguri, Bhilwara, Hyderabad, Jaipur etc have been protesting in front of the ICAI chapters in their cities.

These are the broad demands put forth by those protesting outside ICAI’s chapters in their cities:

1. Provide students a right to avail re-evaluation of their answer papers.
2. Provide a copy of the question booklet and answers to students, who have requested a copy of their answer papers. Till date, ICAI provides only the copies of the descriptive answers written by the students in exams and not of the answers to MCQs in exams.
3. Penalise the evaluators and examiners if they make mistakes while correcting answer papers.
4. Allow students to darken the circles on OMR sheets in exams with pens. Students have alleged that pencil marks get erased while transporting and handling the answer sheets.
5. Enable centralised evaluation of CA answer sheets. The system in place at present involves sending bundles of answer papers to any personal address provided by the examiners by post and getting the papers evaluation.

The issue has been simmering within the CA student community since December 2018, when a similar protest was planned by students and some faculty members. The matter flared up recently after many students noticed discrepancies within their own answer papers, copies of which they obtained from ICAI, in which marks have not been awarded to correct answers. In some papers, the final marks that appeared on the result card were much lower than the marks in their answer sheets which were evaluated.

Also read: CA students to protest against ICAI: Why they are demanding the right of revaluation