E-Paper
Jamia to hold open book exams for undergraduate, postgraduate students
New Delhi
New Delhi
Following protests from students over online proctored examination, Jamia Millia Islamia on Sunday announced guidelines for online open book examination for its undergraduate and postgraduate students.
A compulsory mock examination will also be held for students, university officials said.
To appear for their online examinations, students would have to log in to the university’s examination portal using their credentials and download the question paper. They have also been asked to use separate sheets to answer each question and upload the answer scripts question-wise for easy evaluation.
Students will be given three hours to complete the paper and will get one additional hour to upload the answer scripts to the portal. Students with disabilities will be given five hours and those requiring a scribe will have to arrange it on their own, the university added.
In case students are unable to upload the answer scripts due to technical glitches, they can also email it to obe2020@jmi.ac.in.
“Answer sheets can only be emailed if submission of response through the portal is not possible. Documentary evidence, such as screenshots, is also required to be emailed along with answer response,” the controller of examinations said in the guidelines.
The university has also said that students submitting scripts “through such an alternate medium, may also face delay in declaration of their results, due to verification/scrutiny and validation of process of submission.”
Jamia’s declaration comes months after Delhi university – which also conducted its first online OBE in August last year – saw a delay in declaration of results as multiple email submissions by students had resulted in duplicity of answer scripts.
Qasim Usmani, a final-year undergraduate student of Sociology, who has been a part of the student community opposing the proctored exam mode said, “We wanted assignment-based assessments but the university said as per University Grants Commission guidelines, they had to conduct exams. Online OBE was one of the options we proposed.”
“The OBE option put forward by the university allows us to approach our teachers for question papers if the portal doesn’t work, asks for question-wise answer scripts for smoother evaluation, and doesn’t require high-speed internet for downloading papers or uploading scripts. Following consultations with student groups, we realized this was the best way out,” he said.
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