University of Delhi: Addressing the demands of the students for a complete waiver of the re-evaluation fee, the University’s administration, allegedly, gave a brusque response to the mass-mailing campaign organized by the students. “The administration, instead of acknowledging the issue at hand, chose to insult the students who had sent in the standard mail composed by the students themselves,” said an English Honors student.
The backdrop to the event is the acute fall in grades across various courses in the University following which the students have tried to resort to every available means to let the administration take cognizance of the matter. The administration, however, took notice of the “email writing skills” of the students and all their “grievance and demands were not only ignored but also… [they were] humiliated by replies such as ‘don’t copy paste your concern’ when the whole concern has been missed.” Previously, another mass-mailing campaign had gone unanswered.
The students launched the mass-mailing campaign demanding:
- An urgent extension of deadline beyond May 26 so that the administration, at the least, would be able to gauge the intensity of the issue and acknowledge the genuine demands made by the students.
- Re-evaluation fees must be waived off for all the students seeking revaluation. Charging Rs 1000 per subject for re-evaluation for incompetent and discrepant evaluation schemes, complemented with an economic crisis and a national lockdown, is absolutely unethical.
- The re-evaluated marks must be considered as final instead of calculating average between re-evaluated marks and the original marks as set by University guidelines. These guidelines were framed keeping in mind the scope of the lapse of judgement on behalf of the individual evaluators, but this has been a complete systemic failure on the part of the University administration and the concerned authorities.
Another student was quoted saying, “…We all are suspended in the dilemma of applying or not applying for the re-evaluation procedure… a procedure in which we could not invest our trust… Now, our dilemma is stemming out of our fear of the deadline of a re-evaluation procedure…”
A student also highlighted the process terming it “hectic.” “The fee payment is extremely shady… Even as you try and struggle with the form, the payment method is also very sketchy… I had entered all my card details and pressed pay when a dialogue box popped up that said- This is not a secure connection and the information entered can be available to a third party.”
The students have, however, refused to “back down from [their] demands and would wage a sustained struggle for [their] rights.”
