Colleges are increasingly shifting towards a new method of conducting examinations both in Karnataka and in Kerala to beat question paper leaks. The new solution involves building software using the Python language that allows for questions to be chosen randomly from a question bank and for the question paper to the printed just 30 minutes before the exam, eliminating the possibility of a question paper leak.
Officials from the South Western Regional Office of the University Grants Commission (SWRO-UGC) are already monitoring more than two dozen colleges from the state and Kerala, as they introduce question banks in their institutes.
The UGC will determine the template of the question papers. All that colleges will have to do is feed 10,000 questions into their systems to make a robust question bank. “The question bank will pace difficulty levels, or will segregate questions on the level of difficulty; be appropriate and inclusive of all required chapters, and will avoid duplication of questions,” an official from SWRO-UGC, told The New Indian Express.
This is set to bring about an innovation in question paper setting and will be one of the UGC’s 10 point recommendations that will be soon uploaded to revamp evaluation systems.
This robust question bank will be a precursor to ‘on-demand question papers’ which will be generated without direct human intervention.
With the on-demand question paper, the effort taken to secretly and securely carry the papers to various examination centres will be done away with. Students too will be looking at papers with a combination of questions from different difficulty levels.
