The final-year exams for undergraduate and postgraduate students should be held in June, an expert committee will recommend to the higher education regulator on Monday, two members of the panel told The Telegraph.
If the proposal is accepted and if the state of the Covid-19 battle in June allows it to be implemented, it will push the next academic session back by about two months.
While the seven-member committee will recommend that these exams are held on the campus in the usual pen-and-paper mode, it will suggest that institutions with the required facilities are allowed to conduct the tests online.
The committee appears to have assumed that the lockdown would be called off at the end of April or sometime in May.
“It’s possible the final-year students will be called to the campus to take the exams in pen-and-paper mode one month after the lockdown is over. So the exam may take place in June,” a panel member said.
He said residential institutions that provide laptops or PCs in the hostels may conduct the exams online. The committee wants the decision left to the individual institutions.
Normally, the annual exams are conducted in April-May, with the results declared within a month.
The panel also wants the varsities given the discretion to decide if to allow their pre-final-year students, who are usually promoted anyway, take their annual exams from home.
These students can receive the question papers over email or WhatsApp, write or type their answers on sheets of paper, scan the answer sheets with their mobiles, and email or WhatsApp the images to the institutions for evaluation.
The University Grants Commission had set up the committee, headed by Haryana Central University vice-chancellor R.C. Kuhad, on April 6 to recommend how and when to resume exams and other academic activities, affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.
So far the committee has held the interactions among its members and teachers through Skype and WhatsApp.
“The challenge before the committee was to suggest measures to ensure the examination standards are not compromised. Many suggestions came, including that for online tests. But online tests are not possible for all institutions because of a lack of facilities,” a second committee member said.
The teachers have largely supported the suggestions. Rajesh Jha, a member of Delhi University’s executive council, however, said that students of the same course in the same university should all take their exams in the same mode: pen-and-paper or online.
The concerns stem from the lack of clarity whether the online tests will be conducted under supervision and with the examinees’ access to the Internet regulated.
“It should not happen that some students take a pen-and-paper test while others (studying the same course in the same university) take the test in online mode,” Jha said.
Prodded by the UGC, many universities are holding online classes, but Jha said the practice should not become the norm since it excludes the socially and economically disadvantaged students.
A teacher at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, said the proposal to let pre-final-year students take their exams from home would, if accepted, compromise the quality of the tests.
“The students will write the answers at home without supervision. The answers will come via email or WhatsApp. The teachers will probably not take much interest in evaluating these papers thoroughly. This will compromise standards,” he said.
The UGC wants classes conducted on at least 180 days in an academic year. Since admissions for 2020-21 are likely to be delayed by at least two months, the committee has suggested the cancellation of the winter and summer vacations in 2020-21.
IIT exams
The IITs are planning to conduct their annual exams around July. The institutes have advanced their summer vacation and plan to reopen in the last week of June.
