Maharashtra: MU’s online evaluation mess

The initiative of the vintage but continuously parochialised University of Mumbai (MU, estb. 1857) to replace manual assessment of students’ examination papers with an online evaluation system has come a cropper with technological disruptions and tedious processes delaying results for most of the university’s undergrad and postgraduate students. The delay has impacted 425,000 students who wrote their exams 60-90 days ago in March.  Protests against the delay in completing assessments have reached the Maharashtra governor C.V. Rao, ex officio chancellor of the university, who set July 31 as the deadline for declaration of all results. However, with the university’s administration unable to complete the formidable task of correcting 1.75 million answer scripts within the deadline and requesting  an extension until August 5, the public outcry against the delay resonated within the state’s legislative assembly with academics, student unions and political parties demanding the resignation of vice chancellor Sanjay Deshmukh.  The Maharashtra Universities Act, 1994, requires universities to declare all results within 45 days of students writing an exam, a mandate MU has often failed to meet, blaming burgeoning student enrollment — 715,000 students in 778 affiliated colleges in 2017-18. Ironically, vice chancellor Deshmukh’s spirited January 24 announcement introducing the online assessment system for all courses this year onwards, promised speeding up the evaluation process by automating several time-consuming manual processes such as totaling marks and preparing mark-sheets. However, plagued by its slow bureaucratic processes, the MU administration took five months (until May) to select the agency to implement the online assessment system, only after which scanning the answer scripts — the first step towards online evaluation — could commence. When by May 12 most of the answer-sheets were scanned and ready for assessment, only 400 of the 9,500 evaluators were available to assess the 1.75 million answer-sheets because the summer vacations had — not unexpectedly — begun. “With evaluators needing some time to get used to the online assessment system, the number of papers evaluated also depended on the Internet speed at colleges designated as centralised assessment process (CAP) centres. Complaints of technical glitches resulting in poorly scanned papers, mixed-up or wrong subject answer sheets, server issues and poor connectivity have been cropping up even in the last leg of evaluation,” says a CAP coordinator speaking on condition of anonymity. While the number of evaluators improved substantially after the academic year commenced in June, the MU administration resorted to desperate measures as the July 31 deadline drew near. The varsity administration urged college principals to mobilise and motivate faculty to report for assessment duty even during their weekly days off resulting in 5,396 evaluators assessing 30 answer booklets daily (161,880 answer sheets per day) and the number of CAP centres was increased from 100 to 255 by May 10. Through personal appeals, Deshmukh even roped in faculties of other state varsities including Nagpur University, Savitribai Phule Pune University and the Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad to aid and enable MU’s online assessment drive.  Despite this unprecedented effort, the university failed…