Why is my sheet marked "failed" — and what do I do about it?

Why is my sheet marked "failed"? It means the system could not read that scan confidently — the page came in too dark, too skewed, folded, or with a corner cut off. The important part: the physical sheet is safe in your hand. Nothing is lost. You find the cause, re-scan that one paper, and upload it again. Here is the checklist.

First, what "failed" actually means

During processing in CheckOMR (By Navodaya Study), every sheet goes through reading — alignment, bubbles, handwriting. If a page cannot be read with confidence, the system marks it failed instead of guessing. A failed sheet is never scored half-wrong on a hunch; it is set aside and counted in the live status. That is the system protecting your students' scores, not losing them.

The 6 causes, and the fix for each

1. Scan too dark or too light. A photocopy-style dark scan makes filled and empty bubbles look the same; a washed-out one makes real fills look empty. Fix: normal scan exposure, check the preview before saving.

2. Fold or crease across the page. A fold through the bubble area curves rows of bubbles and confuses reading. Fix: flatten the sheet on the desk; re-scan. Badly created sheets get a fresh photocopy, then scan the copy.

3. Corner cropped out of frame. The alignment markers live near the edges — no corners, no accurate reading. Fix: keep all four corners inside the frame; if the scanner's feeder crops them, scan on a flatbed or by phone instead.

4. Page too skewed. A big tilt (more than a few degrees) puts bubbles where the system does not expect them. Fix: hold the phone directly above the page; on a scanner, seat the sheet flush against the guide.

5. Stray marks across the page. Doodles, ink blots or a staple shadow crossing bubble rows read as false fills. Fix: re-scan a clean photocopy with the marks whited out.

6. Wrong or blurry capture on mobile. A moving-phone shot blurs the whole page. Fix: steady the phone directly above, tap, check sharpness in the preview.

The recovery — 3 minutes

1. Pull the failed sheets' papers out of the pile (match them by student name/roll on the page).
2. Apply the fix from the checklist above.
3. Re-scan just those sheets into a small PDF, create a new batch, attach the same answer key, process.

The failed count in the original batch stays as a record; the re-uploaded sheets come back with full results. Nothing else in your completed batch changes.

When many sheets fail at once

A couple of failures in hundreds is normal. More than a handful means the setup is the problem, not individual sheets: change of light, a new phone, a scanner tray feeding crooked. Fix the process before uploading the rest of the pile — you will save yourself ten re-scans by fixing one cause.

A failed sheet is a speed bump, not a wall. The paper is in your hand; two minutes of re-scanning puts the student's score back where it belongs.