Law courses: Mumbai University will only conduct final-year exams

The university’s academic council approved a plan to hand over the responsibility of conducting examinations for the first two years of the three-year LLB course, and the first four years of the five-year course, to colleges.

All semester examinations of law courses, except the final year ones, will be conducted by law colleges and not the University of Mumbai — a decision the university has taken to reduce the burden on the delay-prone exam department .

HT

The university’s academic council approved a plan to hand over the responsibility of conducting examinations for the first two years of the three-year LLB course, and the first four years of the five-year course, to colleges, two council members confirmed.

This is first major decision after the university got a new Vice Chancellor on April 27.

The question papers for these exams, however, will still be provided by the university, and colleges will still follow the common examination schedule the university sets.

The decision comes a month after law college principals, and university and state government officials discussed the possibility of colleges conducting all but the final-year exams.

Currently, the university is being weighed down by assessments, after it adopted the on-screen marking system in 2017.

The result: delays in declaring results during the current academic year. MU has 48 affiliated law colleges, but only 193 teachers approved for assessment work.

The university is yet to finish assessing more than 74,000 answer sheets of the law examinations held in January and February, for the last semester. At present, the university conducts all semester examinations of the three-year LLB course, and the exams for the last three years of the five-year courses.

The Bachelor of Engineering course is another exception, where the first-year examinations are also conducted by the university. Some students and teachers have argued that it would lead to a deterioration of the examination quality and may more malpractice.

Students Law Council, a city-based student group, had even written a letter to the varsity opposing the move. In its letter, the group said the varsity was trying to skirt responsibilities by handing over the exams to the colleges.

It also suggested the move will prove detrimental to the university’s efforts of bringing transparency to the examination system.