Published May 31, 2025 | 9:33 AM ⚊ Updated May 31, 2025 | 12:41 PM
Exam. Representational Image. (iStock)
Synopsis: The 2025 Andhra Pradesh SSC exams saw major evaluation errors, prompting over 66,000 reverification requests. Shocking discrepancies, including a student’s marks rising from 23 to 96, led CM Chandrababu Naidu to order an inquiry. Five evaluators were suspended. The education department plans reforms, including OMR changes, and announced a special reapplication window for RGUKT from June 5–10.
The Andhra Pradesh Secondary School Certificate (SSC) Public Examinations for 2025 have thrown up a significant number of evaluation errors, prompting students to file a record 66,363 applications for reverification and recounting from 34,709 students out of 6,14,459 candidates who appeared for the exams held in March.
The department of education, in a detailed note on Friday, 30 May, said all 66,363 reverification and recounting applications are set to be resolved by the first week of June 2025.
For the first time in a decade, five evaluators were suspended for committing gross errors, the note said.
With discrepancies between original marks and those after reverification and recounting were very wide in respect of some students, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu ordered inquiry and action against those responsible for bungling evaluation.
In a statement on 28 May, the chief minister said that wide difference in marks before and after revaluation should be taken seriously and asked the officials to ensure that the students who got good marks after reverification should not be put to hardship in getting admission to colleges.
He wanted a report submitted to him and take measures to prevent recurrence of such instances in the future.
There were shocking discrepancies in marks in respect of some students. For instance, Tejaswini, a ZP High School student from Bapatla district, was declared having failed the examination with 23 marks in social studies, but was awarded 96 marks after reverification.
She applied for reverification as she was flummoxed to score such low marks when she could get more than 90 marks in other subjects. After awarding 96 marks in social studies, her total went up to 575 and now she could even apply for IIIT.
With the chief minister asking the authorities to allow admission to colleges to such students, Tejaswini may not have problem in securing admission in IIIT even though the last date is over.
The note from the Department of Education on Friday gave a graphic account of the systemic issues that had led to bungling of the evaluation process, leading to unprecedented measures, including the suspension of evaluators and proposing reforms to prevent future errors.
The note said that the 2025 SSC examinations saw the evaluation of 45,96,527 answer scripts by a team of 16,482 Assistant Examiners (AEs), 5,494 Special Assistants (SAs), and 2,747 Chief Examiners (CEs). Each AE was tasked with evaluating 40 scripts per day, a workload that the report suggests may contribute to the errors observed.
The report details the distribution of mark changes for 2024 and 2025 as follows:
The report mentioned several recurring issues in the evaluation process. They included overlooked columns during mark calculations, errors in transferring awarded marks to OMR sheets, scripts with unmarked responses or incorrectly awarded zero marks, three-tier supervision mechanism (AE, SA, CE) failed to detect these inconsistencies, despite requiring signatures from all levels.
The department is proposing modification of OMR design to minimise counting errors from SSC 2026.
It has also proposed a special reapplication window from 5 to 10 June for RGUKT (Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies), which had closed on 20 May—before the reverification and recounting results were finalized—to allow eligible students to reapply with their updated mark sheets.
(Edited by Sumavarsha)
