The BCI official in charge of the bar exam department told Legally India today that now that all of the answer sheets have been evaluated there is no reason for delaying the results beyond this week.

Legally India contacted the official bar exam hotline earlier today. On being asked for the timeline of the AIBE IX results an official said that because around 40,000 answer sheets were to be evaluated, the result was taking time.

The BCI official Legally India spoke to said that the official hotline (as available on the AIBE website) connects to the BCI’s AIBE contractor ITES Horizon.

AIBE answer sheets are not evaluated manually because they are in the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) form. Computers evaluate whether the one option marked on the sheet, as an answer, out of four options, matches with the correct option fed into the system.

The wait for the AIBE IX results is in its eleventh week. It took six weeks for the BCI to publish the AIBE VIII results.

The date of this AIBE was postponed by 83 days to 6 March due to a website malfunction by AIBE contractor ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd, whose contract was extended quietly late last year despite consistent delays and underperformance by the contractor (as well as serious question marks surrounding the allocation of the contract to the company in light of more qualified and more competitively priced bidders).

Full disclosure: BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent a defamation legal notice to Legally India regarding stories published pointing out the problems with the AIBE Legally India in its response had denied defaming the BCI or its chairman since all reports were based on facts.