SSC online forms: Technical glitches make schools sweat

Even as the deadline for filling the 2016 Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exam registration forms online nears, several schools in Mumbai are having a tough time filling the forms as the process has been marred by technical glitches. The last day to fill up the forms is Saturday (October 31).

Concerned that they will not be able to meet the deadline, the schools have written to the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education to give them more time to complete the process.

They have also asked for waiver of late fees. The online registration for the March 2016 exams began on October 19 but the schools complained that they have been unable to access the state board website to upload the registration for ms of their students for the past four days.

“The software given to us by the board to fill the forms is not working smoothly,” said Prashant Redij, spokesperson, Mumbai School Principals Association t hat has complained to the board authorities.

“We are unable to access the webpage. An error message stating that the page could not be displayed due to internal error is displayed on the page,” he said. State board chair person Gangadhar Mamane said that the errors were caused as a large number of schools have been accessing the website in the past few days.

“Schools had more than a week to register online,” said Mamane, adding, “We are, however, seeing a heavy traffic only over the past few days, which is putting a load on the server.”

Most schools have started registrations only this week as they said they were earlier busy filling up students’ data into the online government database SARAL. Schools had to fill in the details on the database by October 26 or risk not getting staff approvals and grants.

“We could not start form filling till today as our computer staff was occupied with uploading the i nfor mation of more than 600 students in our school onto the database,” said a principal of a school in Dadar, on the condition of anonymity. “No one else in our faculty could work on the online registration.”