The Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) on Monday night announced the results of re-evaluation of answer scripts of over 3.82 lakh students who had failed to obtain the passing marks in their examinations held earlier this year. This included 23 students who had killed themselves last month.
Authorities found no change in the result status of the students, who ended their lives but 1,137 students cleared the exams as their marks were revised following re-verification of their answer scripts.
After a day-long suspense over the results, Board of Intermediate Education (BIE) released the results of re-verification of answer scripts of failed students. BIE had declared the results of the Intermediate examination, the state board equivalent of Class 11 and 12, on April 18.
Out of 9.43 lakh students who appeared in the exams, 5.60 lakh had cleared it. After the announcement of results, many errors by the authorities in valuation of answer scripts and processing the results came to light, triggering a public outcry.
A spate of suicides by students over failure in exams kicked up a storm with opposition parties and student bodies taking to the streets demanding justice for the students.
After the matter reached the High Court, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on April 24 announced free re-verification of answer sheets of all failed students.
According to BIE secretary M. Ashok, 23 students killed themseles and another three students attempted to do so. Out of 23 students, 20 had failed and two students had passed but they took the extreme step over not scoring the marks that they expected. A student who committed suicide had appeared in three out of six exams and she had passed in all the 3 subjects.
After re-verification of answer scripts of all 23 students, the authorities found that there is no change in their results. A total of 9,02,429 answer scripts of the failed students were re-evaluated under a massive exercise across the state.
As the High Court had directed BIE to make corrected answer scripts of all students available on its website, the authorities took up scanning of answer sheets, each comprising 25 papers. Over 2.25 crore pages had to be scanned.
Ashok said the second level checking using Artificial Intelligence (AI) method and scanning for 19,788 answer scripts was still under process. "All efforts are being made to complete second level testing, scanning and uploading by tonight or tomorrow," he said.
The results of the students, who had passed the exams but applied for re-verification of their answer scripts, will be announced in three days.