Officials from the University of Mumbai said the digital assessment of papers has picked up pace and results are expected soon.
However, at the forefront of this process are teachers battling several problems — they are often assigned papers in Marathi instead of English, face delays in receiving IDs and passwords to log into an assessment centre, and endure network errors — a fallout of the new system that teachers say they have not been trained well enough to use.
“Though I teach English-medium students, I was assigned Bachelor of Mass Media (BMM) papers in Marathi for three days in a row. I had to call the helpline twice. I then wrote to the BMM chairperson, asking him to correct this error,” said a teacher who works at a city-based college and did not wish to be identified.
Teachers across departments have complained to the university about this same problem. However, no action has been taken yet.
Many teachers could not start the assessment process in May as half of them were on vacation and many others had not received the basic ID and password they need to log into a common assessment process (CAP) centre.
“Some of us had to visit three centres to find our names. We could start assessment only after this. The process is tedious and takes a while to get used to as we were trained for less than a day on how to assess digitally,” said a teacher from a suburban college.
MU had said teachers would be trained on the job and each CAP centre will have a technician from the conducting agency.
However, most of the 142 CAP centres don’t have a single technician from the agency to help.Instead, they have been forced to make do with computer lab technicians of respective colleges.
{{/usCountry}}However, most of the 142 CAP centres don’t have a single technician from the agency to help.Instead, they have been forced to make do with computer lab technicians of respective colleges.
{{/usCountry}}Even as students are worried about when their results will be declared, principals think there is still hope as assessment work seems to have picked up in the last couple of weeks.
“On any given day, our teachers are busy balancing their time between regular lectures and assessment. I’ve been informed that most teachers have got the hang of the system by now. Students should expect results soon,” said Hemlata Bagla, principal of KC College, Churchgate.