The National Institute of Technology Durgapur is planning to bring final-year BTech students of the eighth semester to the campus so that they can do lab sessions to make up for the classes lost since March last year.

The students will graduate in June.

“We are planning to hold the lab sessions for two months. During this period, students can attend theory classes on digital platforms while staying in the hostels in strict adherence to safety protocols. But if students graduate without attending the labs, they won’t learn a substantial part of their curriculum. They must complete the laboratory components physically,” NIT director Anupam Basu told Metro.

The final-year batch has 650 students.

If students don’t attend labs, they could face problems while being interviewed by potential employers or when they go for higher studies, a teacher said. “Attending classes in the departmental labs is a must. Or their studies will remain incomplete,” he said. Another teacher said students would find it difficult to write some of the final semester papers if they didn’t attend lab classes.

The institute started bringing the 75 MTech final-year students to campus this month for lab-dependent hardware projects.

“We are looking forward to staggered physical reopening across all the years, starting with fourth-year students being brought to the campus from mid-March. Engineering studies cannot happen by merely attending theory classes online,” Basu said.

Classes for the graduating batch have been disrupted since they were in the sixth semester. They were promoted to the final year in July last year, after which they have not attended labs.

Once the fourth-year students are through with the lab and theory classes, the institute wants to hold the eighth semester exams on the campus.