Students' protest against ICAI enters third day

Hundreds of students are protesting against the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) since Monday demanding the right to get answer-sheets re-evaluated. Also supported by some chartered accountants, who run CA coaching classes, students are demanding better transparency in the paper evaluation process.

The protest got a boost when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi extended his support to students.

They are also demanding amendment to Regulation 39(4) of the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949.

According to the regulation, students can`t demand revaluation of answers by the ICAI. They can only demand re-totalling of marks and can`t question the merit of not awarding numbers for a particular answer.

Though the ICAI announced reforms in evaluation of answer-sheets on September 21, faculty members and students termed them vague and non-transparent.

Rejecting the ICAI reforms, faculty members, like Neeraj Arora and Parveen Sharma, requested students to join the protest at the ICAI`s Delhi office to demand a fair evaluation system. Since then, students are holding protests in several places, like Durgapur, Siliguri, Bhilwara, Hyderabad and Jaipur.

The students are demanding right to seek re-evaluation of answer-sheets, supply of the question booklet and answer papers on request, penalty for wrong evaluation of the answer-sheet, permission darken circles on OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets in examinations with pens and centralised evaluation of papers.

While students allege that pencil marks get erased in the transportation/handling of answer-sheets, the ICAI provides only copies of descriptive answers and not the answers to multiple choice wuestions (MCQs).

The CA students have been raising these issues since December 2018. It protest gained momentum when students noticed discrepancies in answer papers, copies of which were obtained from the ICAI.

While in some cases marks had not been awarded for correct answers, in many cases number on the result card were lower than what was written on answer-sheets.