CBSE portal stable for over 72 hours; glitches under probe says IIT Madras director Kamakoti

New Delhi: IIT Madras Director V Kamakoti on Tuesday said a four-member team from the institute and IIT Kanpur has begun examining the recent glitches in the CBSE portal, including payment failures and allegations related to answer sheet uploads. In an exclusive interview with PTI, Kamakoti said the team started examining the issue on Monday evening and the primary focus is to determine the exact cause of the disruption.

"There was an issue for around two days. So what was the actual reason for the failure? Was it some development issue, technical issue, or was it even a cyber attack? Because anything is possible. So that is what we want to basically find out so that it doesn't recur in future," he said.

He also said the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) portal had remained stable for the last "72 hours-plus". Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday directed IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur to depute professors and technical experts to assist the CBSE in ensuring a glitch-free re-evaluation process.

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CBSE Portal Review: Team begins probe

Kamakoti said the CBSE's move to introduce the On-Screen Marking (OMS) is aimed at increasing transparency by allowing students to view evaluated answer sheets and understand where their marks were deducted. "I think, from the CBSE's point of view, they tried to do something very good," he said, adding that the system "brings in a lot more transparency". "But somewhere some payment or some gateway, something has failed," he said. The team will "go in depth" into the issue and examine "what could be a very robust platform that in future will not land us in this type of failure".

The IIT Madras director said the team will first conduct a "full medical checkup" of the website and give suggestions and recommendations to the developers handling the platform, besides examining how the CBSE portal and payment systems interacted during fee transactions.

"How those two software talk to each other... how could you minimise those failures? This is what we will go into," he said. On the composition of the team, Kamakoti said IIT Madras has deputed two experts -- a senior official experienced in large-scale deployment of software and another senior project staff member familiar with data analytics log. "Similarly, from IIT Kanpur, there are two faculty members," he said.

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OMS and Upload Concerns

Asked about complaints by students that the uploaded answer sheets did not match their handwriting or appeared blurred, Kamakoti said, "We have not still gone to that stage of analysing this." The team will examine the answer sheet scanning and uploading process from an IT perspective to see how the mistakes, if any, can be avoided. It will look into it completely and see where things could have gone wrong. It could have been a manual error, he said. "At some point, there is manual, to start with. So you basically scan and then you put the roll number and then upload it. So there is a manual intervention of converting your physical answer script into a digital thing," he said.

Kamakoti defended the broader idea behind the OMS system, saying it gives students and parents greater visibility into the evaluation process. "Today, there is an opportunity given by the CBSE to appeal. Now at least I know what has happened to my answer script," he said. Calling the system "a great step", he said it represents "the ultimate transparency you can bring to the system". "Any good thing will face some sort of initial issues and we will resolve them," he said.

According to the IIT Madras director, increased public interest in accessing answer sheets could also have contributed to the portal issues. "More people would have started looking at it and so hence the bandwidth and internet bandwidth and other things would have become a choke point," he said. Drawing from his own experience, Kamakoti said students naturally remain curious about evaluation details. "I got 99 out of 100 in my 1985 exam.

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Till today, I am curious why I lost that one mark," he said. Kamakoti said access to answer scripts can help parents understand a child's strengths and thought process better. "The entire thought process of the child can be understood from the way they have answered a public examination," he said. At the same time, Kamakoti cautioned parents against putting additional pressure on students. "Parents should not do a post-mortem analysis on the paper.