Pune: Twelve Senate members and educationists have written to the vice-chancellor recommending offline-online final year exams for SPPU, together with a schedule for holding them. The state government and authorities at Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) haven’t yet come up with a final direction on conducting final year degree exams. Amid the growing confusion among students, the letter, jointly signed by the dozen Senate members and educationists, was sent to the VC of the institution. It has recommended an offline-online exam pattern for professional and non-professional courses along with an exam schedule.
This letter addressed to SPPU Vice-Chancellor Dr Nitin Karmalkar states that after the Supreme Court mandated that final year degree examinations would have to be conducted as per directives from the University Grants Commission (UGC). A state-level committee has also been set up to study how exams can be conducted.
The court order behind final year exams for SPPU
The legal position was settled only three weeks before the letter. On 28 August 2020, a bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, R Subhash Reddy and MR Shah held in Praneeth K and others v University Grants Commission that a state and university cannot promote final year students without holding final year examinations, upholding the UGC’s revised guidelines of July 2020, which required universities to complete the examinations by the end of September in offline, online or blended mode.
The judgment left one opening, and Maharashtra could use it. A state that had decided under the Disaster Management Act that the exams could not be held by 30 September could apply to the UGC to extend the deadline, and the commission would communicate a rescheduled date. That is why the question before the university was never whether to hold final year exams for SPPU students, only when and in what form. The state-level committee mentioned in the letter was set up to answer exactly that.
The letter was signed by the Senate’s senior members and educationists, including Gajanan Ekbote, Shamkant Deshmukh, Sanjay Kharat, Santosh Dhore, Dadabhau Shinalkar, Bhagyashree Manthalkar, among others.
As per media reports, an online exam mode is probably under consideration, in which students can appear from their homes. However, with the international ranking of SPPU and other factors in mind, Senate members have suggested some key measures:
- Exams of professional courses should be conducted online.
- Exams of non-professional or traditional courses should be conducted offline.
These primary suggestions were made keeping in mind various factors, with the main one being that only roughly 40% of students would have access to laptops, personal computers or smartphones
“Many students come from rural pockets and low-income families. Some of them are first-generation learners. Their parents have lost their jobs or small businesses have incurred heavy losses owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. It would be wrong to assume that students would have access to technology and gadgets to appear for these online exams or even the money to ensure high-speed internet or WiFi connections,” the letter stated.
Senate members also mentioned that students have returned to their villages. Out of the 2.3 lakh degree students in the final year, many live in remote and tribal areas where power failure is common. Considering all these points, Senate members have requested that the exams should be conducted offline at centres close to the diverse home-towns and villages of students and that the number of centres should also be increased. They also insist that the exams should be of 50 marks, with multiple-choice questions and time duration of an hour, while students should be called in three batches.
All guidelines should be followed, including maintaining a distance of two benches between each student, along with mandatory use of masks and sanitisers by students, invigilators and other staff at the exam centres, the letter further mentioned.
Savitribai Phule Pune University: offline-online exam pattern in context
The Senate members’ central claim, that only around 40 per cent of students had laptops, computers or smartphones, is consistent with what national statisticians had found. The National Statistical Office’s survey of household social consumption on education, summarised by the Ministry of Statistics, found that only about 24 per cent of Indian households had internet access in 2017-18, 15 per cent in rural areas, and that barely 4 per cent of rural households owned a computer. For a university with many final year students in rural pockets, an offline-online exam pattern was a direct response to those numbers. The 2.3 lakh finalists the Senate letter counts give a sense of the scale of any online-only plan.
The students have little option but to persevere because the raging pandemic is going nowhere anytime soon. With the Senate and Educationalists looking out for them at SPPU, perhaps the struggle will not be enormous.
Since then: how SPPU held the exams
The university eventually ran its final year exams between 12 and 31 October 2020, online and offline, Punekar News reported. The online paper used the multiple-choice format the letter had also asked for: students answered any 50 out of 60 questions, with no negative marking. A re-examination for students who missed the first round or hit technical problems followed from 5 to 7 November; about 28,000 students were expected for it and about half appeared.
By 10 November, results for 21 courses had been declared, some with a 100 per cent pass rate, and examinations director Mahesh Kakade said the board was trying to declare the rest by 12 November. Results improved by 20 to 30 per cent on a normal year, which university officials, among them science and technology dean Manohar Chaskar, put down to the multiple-choice format, the absence of negative marking, the extra preparation time the postponement gave students, and sample questions issued in advance.
About 600 students who had not registered were to be given a chance to sit the paper in the following days. The final year exams for SPPU closed out an argument that had run for most of 2020.
