Teachers and officials of Jadavpur University are divided over how to assess final-semester science students.

The teachers want the average of at least three best semester performances to be counted while giving the weightage of previous semesters.

The officials want to give the weightage of the best semester performance in the same manner it has been done in the engineering and arts faculties.

The university had on June 12 announced the mode of assessment for arts and engineering.

It has convened a meeting of the exam board next week to work out the mode of assessment for science, a university official said.

The university had announced that performance in previous semesters and internal assessments of the current semester would be factored in to assess final-year students across the three faculties, but the difference surfaced over unifor-mity in fixing the parameters.

The faculty council of science moved a resolution on June 2 that says: “Fifty percentage weightage will be given on the performance of the previous semesters to prepare the result of the final semesters. This will be calculated as follows: for undergraduate: average percentage of aggregate marks of the best three semesters. For postgraduate: average percentage of aggregate marks of the best three semesters.”

“If you consider the performance of at least three semesters, it reflects whether the student has been a constant performer. But if the university takes only the best aggregate, it can help a student, but it does not show whether a student has been constant,” a teacher of the mathematics department said.

Some teachers have cited “consistency”; they are in favour of an average percentage of aggregate marks of the previous five semesters at the undergraduate level, another teacher said.

“The teachers have explained to the university their rationale. Let the exam board meet next week and take the final call. We have to go by what the board decides because the evaluation has to be completed soon,” Partha Pratim Roy, a teacher of the physics department, said.

The Telegraph had on June 14 reported that for engineering students, 30 per cent of the assessment would be based on the best aggregate marks of all the past semesters and 70 per cent on home assignments or any other assignment done through the distance mode.

For arts students, one of the two options is basing 60 per cent of the assessment on the best aggregate marks of all the past semesters.

“While helping students get the best grades, the uni-versity should not forget they need to assess a candi-date based on merit even under these trying circumstances,” a chemistry teacher said.