“Exams”, the very word is known to cause anxiety and stress in a student’s mind. All of us have suffered from examination fever at one stage or the other in our lives. However, in the tough competitive age of today, what causes more jitters in the hearts of students and parents than examinations is the anticipation of “Exam Results”. Be it Results of School Board or of any Entrance Exam, anxious students have always thronged the Notice Boards keenly looking for their Roll Number. In view of all this anxiety, nothing can be better than the facility to check out one’s result in the safety of one’s own home even before it hits the School Notice Boards. That is exactly what NIC’s endeavour to “Publish Exam Results on the Net” aimed to accomplish and has successfully been able to achieve. Like the previous years, this year again saw millions of students accessing NIC’s special website for Examination Results http://results.nic.in. With its unfailing record of successfully providing various important results through the net, this website has proved extremely popular with a wide range of audiences including students, parents, school authorities and even cyber café owners.
The Set-Up With the aim of providing fast and smooth access to Exam Results clear in mind, it was imperative for the concerned team of NIC to ensure that the requisite infrastructure was well in place. Dedicated state-of-the-art servers were set up exclusively for publishing the Results. These servers were a combination of Web Servers (at the front end) and Database servers (at the back end). The front end web servers were powered with Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0, while the database servers were set up using SQL Servers. The technologies of 'Load Balancing", 'Multicasting' and 'DNS Round Robin' were used to take care of the peak load on the servers, immediately after the announcement of any result. In addition, staging servers were also set up to enable NIC State Centres to upload and test the results before passing on for final publishing.
Academic, Entrance or Recruitment – we published them all !! The Service of providing Exam Results was not limited to School Board Results or other Academic Results but also covered various Entrance Examinations and Recruitment Exams.
Academic Results on NIC's Web Servers CBSE Exam Results (Class X and Class XII) : http://cbse.nic.in CISCE Exam Results (Class X and Class XII) http://cisce.nic.in Mizoram School (MBSE) Results http://mizoram.nic.in/mbse Andhra Pradesh SSC Exam Results http://sscap.nic.in Nagaland Board of School Education Results http://nbse.nic.in Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Sec Education http://goaresults.nic.in MP Board of Secondary Education : http://mpboard.nic.in Manipur Board of School Education Results : http://manresults.nic.in Meghalaya Board of School Education http://results.nic.in/meghalaya Tamil Nadu State Board Results http://tnresults.nic.in Maharashtra State Board Results http://mahresult.nic.in Rajasthan State Board Results http://rajresults.nic.in Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education http://hpresults.nic.in West Bengal Examination Results http://wbresults.nic.in CA Final and Foundation Exam Results http://caresults.nic.in
The Challenges Publishing results on the Internet is a daunting task involving challenges of all kinds. Due to the large number of students and other interested parties keen to access their results at the earliest, very high traffic has to be anticipated on the website and accordingly the set up has to be made robust and strong. The Results of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) alone fetched a record hit rate of Thirteen Million in a matter of a few hours. (see the table on the next page for details) Most of the Results were launched at quite odd hours such as midnight or early morning and it took an immense co-ordination effort to ensure that the concerned team was always available. And their job didn't end even after the results were declared as they had to monitor the functioning of the servers for many hours after that. Also, the Result data usually arrives at very short notice and the NIC team generally had very little time to work-out everything and ensure that the results are declared well in time. Another big challenge lies in ensuring the validity and accuracy of the Results Data. Though the responsibility of the same lies with the concerned Board, considering the fact that the issue of Exam results is sensitive and has a lot of binding on the students' morale, NIC gives full technical support to facilitate them in ensuring that the results are free from any errors.
The Highlights The preparations for the entire exercise of Publishing Results online began sometime in April and by the time this issue went to Press, many new Results were still being launched from various States. Some of the highlights of this year's service of Publishing Exam Results online include the following : - It was heartening to see the North Eastern States such as Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya take keen initiative in publishing their Exam results on the website. Despite all odds due to the connectivity problems in these States, the results were launched in a smooth manner and students benefitted immensely. -The exercise of publishing and disseminating results online was supported by the various District Centres of NIC who consolidated the results Distt/Block/School wise and passed them on to the concerned authorities. - Apart from putting the Results on the website, NIC developed a software for individually sending out the Results through email to schools/students. For instance, the school wise consolidated results of CBSE were sent to the schools who requested for the same. Also, the results for the Exams conducted by the Institute of Chartered Acountants of India were sent individually to all those students through email who had pre-registered for this service.
A Collaborative Effort... The endeavour of publishing Exam Results online proved successful only because it was a joint effort of all those involved. Since many of the Results came from outside Delhi, NIC State Centres played a valuable role in interacting with the State Board Authorities and carrying out the necessary ground work for the concerned team at NIC Headquarters. Credit is also due to the respective Education Boards without whose initiative and support, such a challenging task could not have been carried out.
Useful Tips and Guidelines In order to make sure that the Exam Results are published online in a fast and hassle free manner, it is extremely important to receive the data in the proper format. NIC has designed special guidelines giving clear instructions regarding the procedures involved such as those relating to the setting up of databases and writing of requisite ASPs etc. For the benefit of the users, these guidelines have been put up on the WWW at http://webservices.nic.in/results2001. The mammoth exercise of publishing so many exam results successfully on the net goes on to show NIC's total commitment towards providing effective e-governance services to all sections of the society. NIC's future plans include using the latest and the most advanced technologies to provide even faster and better service to the students in the coming years.
For more information, please contact: Web Services and Multimedia Applications Division NIC Headquarters Email : wsmad@hub.nic.in