Again, Delhi University is going to adopt a blended open-book examination for the end-semester exams of the second-and third-year students of under graduation and the final year students of postgraduation.
Both students and teachers are worried as the first such examination, which was held earlier in the year due to the coronavirus pandemic, was marred with glitches and problems relating to results still persist. This time, the number of students appearing will be twice more than the previous one.
However, Delhi University claims that it has prepared to conduct a smooth examination. Physical tests in colleges can also be adopted by the students. Dean (Examinations) D S Rawat said that even though the students will appear for physical exams, they will have to upload their answer sheets on the examination portal.
Rawat said that Delhi University has given the option to students to come to colleges as some face issues of internet connectivity at home. However, he also believes that not more than 3% of the students will opt for physical exams because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The principles of many colleges also agree with him. The principal of Ramanujan College, S P Aggarwal said that they have seen that 95% of the students opted to give the examinations from home or a third-party location like a cyber-café. They have made a lot of provisions for the safety of the students. They had conducted the IGNOU exams with ease in the previous month.
Venkat Kumar, the principal of Sri Venkateshwara College, said that online mode will be chosen by many since many students were from outside Delhi. Kumar said that even parents of students residing in Delhi will not be keen on sending their children to colleges.
A second-year student of the College of Vocational Studies who stay in NCR, Amreen Kaur, said that her parents will not want her to travel by metro. She is, however, also worried about glitches. She said that some of her seniors had been marked absent or had got a zero. She knows that it is important to appear for the exams, but she wonders how fair the open-book exam is.
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The teachers also have concerns of their own. The exam nodal officer at CVS, Kumar Ashutosh, said that the volume of the students will be higher. The students are required to submit their answer scripts only on the examination portal this time. The previous time, more than 50% of students had sent the answer scripts through the DU exam mail. Kumar suggested that the load could be reduced by opting for projects and internal assessments for second-year students.
Srinithi Sridharan, an English Hons student of PGDAV College hopes that Delhi University must have improved the system if it is confident of conducting the open-book exam at a mass scale.
Director of DU’s Computer Center, Sanjeev Singh, said that their system is well in place and the exams will be conducted without any difficulty.
