Nagpur News: Thousands of Engineering students have suffered due to arbitrary checking this year. There have been instances wherein students were returned answer sheets with 6- mark answers clearly unmarked and unchecked. Innumerable students have failed because of this lax attitude. Students have lost out on as many as 22 and 35 marks, simply because the examiner chose to overlook entire answers- sometimes even entire sections- while checking. Even more shocking is the fact that when these papers were sent for revaluation, they were returned with “no change” despite the glaring mistakes.
Many students of Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj (RTM) Nagpur University depend on their revaluation results for promotion to the next year. Around 16,000 students in the University are still awaiting their revaluation results which were officially due by 20th October. A large part of these students have been disallowed from giving their University exams because they haven’t cleared their earlier papers in time through no fault of theirs. If they are unable to sit for these exams, they will miss out on an entire academic year, and graduate a year late.
“I had scored a total of 3 marks in a paper last semester”, a female engineering student told Nagpur Today, “I sent it for revaluation, and my paper returned with 30marks. My only explanation is that the examiner had omitted the zero in my final score by mistake. It’s like a lucky draw; whether you score well or not has nothing to do with your efforts, or how well you wrote your paper”.
Students already under pressure due to denial of examination forms that prevented them from sitting for University exams starting Monday were in for another rude shock on Saturday. A group of students visited the LIT (Laxminarayan Institute of Technology) campus in the afternoon, to see employees grazing over their revaluation papers and marking them arbitrarily, in a rush to get their massive, overdue workload of revaluation over with. The sudden, rushed inflow of revaluated papers in the past two days are making the students allege that papers are being returned with little or no checking, a suspicion further strengthened by an entire batch of revaluation papers having been returned to colleges unchanged.
“Thousands of students can’t be mistaken about their results. Those papers represent a semester’s worth of hard work, yet the University employees were stepping on them and stowing them anyhow, with no concern for the fact that the rest of our education depends on them”, a University student told Nagpur Today on Sunday.
The students had gone to demand the photocopy of their corrected answer sheet that every student is promised and uses to check if each answer has been corrected and to verify the totalling. According to students, their valuable semester examination answer sheets were piled on the floor and being stepped upon, while employees lightly put marks on their sheets, without bothering to go through the answers and check the mistakes stated by students while sending their sheets in for revaluation. To add insult to injury, the students were pointedly refused the copies of their own answer sheets that they had gone to collect.
“The answer sheets were lying in front of them, marked by code and number, yet they refused to give us a copy, point blank. We were told that we should have taken further copies of the copies that were given to us and were sent for revaluation”, said another student, adding, “ Promising students have failed due to such checking. On the other hand, students who had been expecting very low results passed flying”.
With the University papers beginning tomorrow, desperate students thronged the University gates again today, hoping for their grievance to be given a voice during the ongoing Senate meet. Senate member Abhijeet Wanjari spoke to these students, and took a few copies of poorly checked answer sheets to show to VC (Vice- Chancellor) Vilas Sapkal during the meet. Abhijeet Wanjari and Adv. Manmohan Desai were very vocal in their support of the students in this case, and insisted that something be done to resolve their harrowing situation.
A special committee has been formed to look into the matter and come upon a solution urgently. Their final decision is expected tonight. There have been suggestions of the exam being postponed solely for the students with pending revaluation, with special Hall Tickets signed by the respective college Principals. The committee includes Adv. Manmohan Bajpai, Abhijeet Wanjari and Dr. Dinesh Agrawal, among others. The final decision is awaited.
