NEW DELHI - Here’s good news for 2.5 million students of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). Their exam results are set to come in faster and they won’t have to travel all the way to Delhi in case they have a complaint.

IGNOU, known for providing long distance education across India and the globe, will soon decentralise its evaluation process CBSE-style, says a top official.

“We are putting in place a Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)-style decentralisation procedure to provide examination results to our students within 60 days,” Srikant Mohapatra, registrar of IGNOU’s student evaluation division, told IANS.

“Like the CBSE zonal system, we are dividing our student evaluation process into five zones - north, south, west, east and northeast. What we have realised is that bringing in all answer papers to Delhi, evaluating them here and sending them back to regional centres takes a lot of time,” he said.

Mohapatra, who had earlier headed IGNOU’s Bihar and Orissa centres after resigning from the post of political science professor, said, “Currently students come to Delhi or write to us complaining about many things, but with the zonal system student grievances can be solved at the zonal level”.

He also said the effort will solve the problem of getting competent evaluators at the state level. Right now evaluators are chosen only by IGNOU’s Delhi headquarters.

“Unlike CBSE, only 10 percent of our evaluators are our own teachers and the rest of them are empanelled but independent evaluators. Through this new system we will ask the zonal offices to empanel new teachers to speed up the evaluation process,” he added.

Currently, the university has around 5,000 empanelled evaluators and a teacher is paid Rs.18 for evaluating the answer paper of one student.

“We will increase the number of evaluators through these zonal offices. The varsity is also in favour of blacklisting evaluators who do not submit their work in time.”

He said this will expose zones to the examination and evaluation process and make them more responsible towards the larger goal of the university - that is, creating a huge pool of well-qualified human resources.

The registrar said a notification regarding this decision will be announced in the near future. Mohapatra said there are some infrastructural problems at the zonal level but things will be sorted out soon.

The IGNOU authorities said they are also contemplating starting a grading system in some of the courses instead of giving marks to students.

IGNOU is the largest open university of the world with nearly 2.5 million students. Besides India, the varsity has a presence in 33 countries across the globe. It has 21 schools of studies, 59 regional centres and over 2,300 learner-support centres.

From the current academic year, CBSE has introduced big changes. Its Class 10 board exams have been made optional. It has been asked by the central government to implement a six-point grading system rather than awarding marks to students. This evaluation will be made as per performance in school round the year.

(Prashant K. Nanda can be contacted at prashant.n@ians.in)