Maharashtra: Exam results delay fallout

The University of Mumbai (estb. 1857) continues to remain mired in the unprecedented crisis it unwittingly landed itself in, when it hastily replaced its age-old manual examination assessment system with a new online assessment system for all its 477 courses. Technological and procedural disruptions in the new system have delayed declaration of exam results to the extent that 106,963 of the 425,000 students who wrote their exams in March-May, are still awaiting their results as late as August 28.  The varsity has declared results of 437 of the 477 undergraduate and postgraduate courses, but has publicly announced that while results for all law, and bachelor courses in arts, science and commerce will be declared by August 31, results of undergraduate distance learning programmes will be declared only in September.  Having missed several deadlines to deliver this year’s results — including the July 31 deadline set by Maharashtra governor, C.V. Rao, ex-officio chancellor of the university — results have been delayed beyond 120 days against the Maharashtra Universities Act, 1994 mandate of declaring results of any exam within 45 days. Even as the university desperately tried to expedite the assessment process, there is widespread condemnation of the varsity’s incompetent administration.  While admitting several petitions filed by students and a teachers’ union, the Mumbai high court rapped university officials. Several political and civil protests have been staged demanding the resignation of varsity vice chancellor, Sanjay Deshmukh, who is accused of unilaterally overhauling the entire system despite the university’s managing committee raising apprehensions about the switchover being completed in such a short period. With the issue monopolising the monsoon session of the Maharashtra state legislative assembly, Deshmukh was finally sent on forced leave (August 9 onwards) while Devanand Shinde, vice chancellor of Shivaji University, Kolhapur, was given additional charge of Mumbai University. The governor/chancellor also sent a show-cause notice to Deshmukh — the first ever sent to a VC in Mumbai University’s history. Replying to the notice, Deshmukh in his defence, blamed the “nexus (that benefits from assessment malpractices) of deliberately mixing-up over lakh answer papers” for causing the delay.  Examination assessment malpractices have been a constant nuisance for the university which supervises 715,000 students in 778 colleges affiliated with it. A May 2016 scandal in which answer papers were surreptitiously spirited away from the campus, tampered with and then replaced, is believed to have prompted Deshmukh’s haste to switch to the fully transparent online assessments that the university had been using to evaluate 200,000 engineering stream exam scripts since 2013. However, in the rush to launch the online system, the varsity over-optimistically believed it could assess 1.75 million answer scripts just as easily as it did 200,000 engineering papers.  Nevertheless the consequence of exam results delays is that a large number of students, especially those who had applied for admission to universities abroad or in other institutes within the country for higher studies, have already lost a year, since they were unable to submit their results in the first week of August.…