Mumbai varsity repeats civil engineering question paper from previous exam

The BDD II paper, held on Thursday, was identical to the one issued by the varsity for exam held in May 2017

A fifth semester civil engineering question paper issued by the University of Mumbai (MU) during the ongoing semester examination was almost identical to the one used in the previous exams.

In October 2015, MU repeated subjective questions from two papers during the April exam in the TYBCom fifth semester exam. (Representational photo/Getty Images)

Arjun Ghatule, in-charge director, board of examination and evaluation, said the varsity will set up a fact finding committee to look into the issue.

“We didn’t know what questions were there in the question paper envelope. After receiving complaints, a show cause notice has been served to the teachers who set the paper,” he said.

Except for numeric value and a rephrased question, students and teachers found that the entire Building Design and Drawing II (BDD II) paper, held on Thursday, was identical to the one issued by the varsity for exam held in May 2017. Surprisingly, most questions in the paper were asked during exams held in December 2016 as well. HT has copies of all the question papers.

A teacher from a college in Thane said that most of the questions in the four-hour long drawing paper are based on the problem statement in the first question. All the three question papers had similar problem statements, except for a numeric value.

“The paper setters need to alter the first question in order to bring variety to the papers. There can't be many variations in the ancillary questions,” he said.

In the last two papers, even the theory questions were same. The teacher said that while alteration in the numeric value does bring some variance to the test, the students who were familiar with the previous papers had an undue advantage.

The varsity has witnessed similar goof-ups earlier as well. In October 2015, MU repeated subjective questions from two papers during the April exam in the TYBCom fifth semester exam. In February last year, a question paper in Master of Computer Application (MCA) first semester examination was copied from the internal examination of a city college.

MU appoints a panel of three teachers to set a question paper. It's not clear which teachers set the Thursday's paper.

"The teachers need to take more efforts while designing papers. If the papers become predictable, the students will become lax," said the teacher from Thane college.