YK Poudel 

Schools across the country could not declare examination results on time after the education ministry’s Education Management Information System (EMIS) portal experienced technical problems.

Officials claimed that the server was restored yesterday. However, teachers still reported problems with the system.

As per the EMIS portal, the admission and transfer processes for classes one to 12 except for class 11 should start on December 20 after the compilation of exam results.

The Information Communication and Technology Division (ICTD), Ministry of Education notified schools on December 16, “As the system is facing technical issues, the ministry requests the schools that could not complete the work online to process the results offline and declare like in the past.” The ministry was working with the local vendor to fix the problems.

The ministry also asked the schools to process the results online in the EMIS portal later.

The nomination for The Royal Academy, Pangbisa, Paro closes today, and the EMIS issue has posed challenges in filing the nominations from schools on time, teachers said.

Teachers and parents face hardships 

Several parents said that they were not being able to log on to the portal, not being able to view the data and applying at their preferred school. “The system is down for a few days and it is delaying the admission process of our children without a clear update on how to proceed,” a parent said.

Sonam Wangmo, a mother, said that majority of Bhutanese parents would still prefer to visit the schools physically to obtain hard copies of the documents as the new online system is a problem for many.

The problem was observed all over the country with parents and teachers facing difficulty in viewing the results, student details and updated marks. For instance, while the system showed the result for term I, the result for term II was missing and vice-versa.

A principal from Samtse said that the school is also facing the issue for which the school decided to facilitate the hard copy results if the students demand. “The results have already been updated on the database and copied in an excel sheet as well for safety.”

Pelkhil School Principal Rie Katayama Dorji said, that the school completed updating the results in the EMIS portal before the server started to get down. “The portal cannot hold the bulk data of the country at the same time when teachers from all over the country are working on the same server. The concern is loss of already updated data from the portal due to server error.”

A teacher from Samdrupjongkhar said that after entering the result for both terms the progress report still remains blank. “This has caused problems in the nomination of toppers for The Royal Academy.”

Many of the schools have declared the annual results and now the hurdle is with the online registration system.

Some of the schools that have not yet declared the results worry that a rapid update in the server may affect the process.

What is EMIS?

In order to transition from using data narrowly for counting students and schools, the development of EMIS, a digitized form of data collection system was launched by the education ministry.

The system was aimed to improve data dissemination to support effective quality assurance and continuous improvement of data culture within and outside of the Ministry of Education.

It consists of 11 modules: organization data comprising of head-quarters; dzongkhag offices; schools; extended classroom resources and early childhood care and development centres (ECCD); staff information that includes head-quarter staff, dzongkhag staff; school staff and ECCD staff; student’s data that includes continuing education; regular students; and ECCD Students.

The portal works on two levels: one that is accessible to the officials under the education ministry; and another, which is viewable for parents and students.

The current EMIS was developed through Laravel, version 8 by New Edge Technologies Private Limited.

The officials from the ministry were unavailable for contact. However, ICTD notified that the division is working with New Edge to resolve the issue at the earliest.