City

IGNOU engineering entrance exam goes offline

After server debacle on October 31, authorities will conduct test by Optical Mark Reading method, probably on December 27

Vishakha Sharma

Posted On Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 11:09:30 PM

After the online entrance exam conducted by Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) failed to take off due to its online system crashing on October 31, the university is finally going to conduct the exam on December 27.

This test will now be conducted through Optical Mark Reading (OMR) method. The IGNOU offers distance education to over 18 lakh students.

This online entrance exam was for students seeking admissions into diploma and degree programmes for engineering under IGNOU. But the system had crashed due to the server problem with Yahoo.

Around 9,350 students who had appeared for the exam had to suffer as they couldn’t attempt the exam. From Pune alone, there were 110 students who had appeared for this exam, but all in vain.

IGNOU on November 3 had also demanded an explanation from Yahoo. A report was sought from the company. According to the exam coordinator for online entance exam, Dr Shiv Kumar Vyas, the exam had started and the system immediately collapsed as it could not survive the hits.

Dr Ashish Agarwal, exam coordinator, said, “We are not conducting the online exam again as we don’t want any problems this time.

We are more concerned about the students as we have to start their academic session, which has already been delayed. This is the main reason we are conducing the exam offline now through the OMR method. The online exam will be conducted from next year.”

“The tentative date for the exam has been decided as December 27, but nothing has been finalised as yet. The applications for the exam are over 9,000.

We are not focussing our attention to when Yahoo would reply to our notice. All we want is to conduct the exam as soon as possible,” he added.

What is OMR?
Optical Mark Reading is a type of system that gathers information by using a hardware device that detects a reflection or an absence of reflection from a card or piece of paper.

OMR processing is popular for tests, where students receive a special card containing several empty circles and a packet that contains the questions and possible answers to each of the questions.

The student must complete the test by using a pencil to fill in each blank circle with what he or she believes is the correct answer.

For example, if the answer is ‘B’, the student would have to completely fill in the ‘B Circle’ to get the answer correct.

Once the card or form has been completed, a user would feed the cards into a system that grades and/or gathers the information from the card.

An example of an OMR system is the Scanmark 5500 from Scantron, a system that is capable of processing 5,500 documents every hour.

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