University of Delhi: After 171 Economics teachers across the University had written to the Head of the Department of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, 141 students of the Department of Economics at the Ramjas College stepped aboard to address the bone of contention, ie, the Open Book Examinations (OBE).
The teachers in their letter nudged the “serious hindrances” to the OBE according to the pattern suggested by the University such as network connectivity, varied resolutions in the PDFs uploaded by the students, unavailability of study materials due to the mid-semester break and the subsequent lockdown and some other problems faced by the economically and socially disadvantaged students. “The University will be in no position to stop parallel communication while the examination is on” which will be gravely conducive to “the sanctity of the examinations.”
The letter addressed by the students to the Dean of Examinations and the Head of the Department of Economics at the University points out that the OBE is “extraordinarily discriminatory” in view of the partial or even complete inaccessibility to the study resources and the “health and economic crisis” being faced by the students. The letter also mentions a lack of “confidence in the capability of the University to install servers which will ensure that the online exams happen smoothly” as the “server failure is a bi-annual event… when the semester results are announced” and more recently when the students took to filling the online examination form that crashed the server.
The students have proposed alternatives to the OBE that resonate with the advisory issued by the Ministry of HRD suggesting calculation of grades on the basis of average grades. The students have, however, called for a 25% proportion of the marks of the Internal Assessments of this semester and 75% of the grades in the previous semesters as the evaluation schemes in the Internal Assessments vary across different colleges which might be either “beneficial” or “detrimental” to the interests of the students. The letter also suggests that the students with a single Essential Repeat (ER) should be promoted in that paper while those with multiple ERs should appear for the examinations when the situation eases.
