E-Paper
First day of SPPU final exam plagued with tech snags, mismanagement
The first day of the final year students’ exams at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) and its affiliated colleges were loaded with technical snags and delays.
The first day of the final year students’ exams at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) and its affiliated colleges were loaded with technical snags and delays.
For the past month, students have been preparing for exams that began on Monday.
On the first day, among many other issues, students reported delays at the offline examination at centres, irrelevant questions, and various other problems.
According to students, the SPPU administration failed in operating and managing the exams well.
A total of 2.5 lakh final year students are appearing for the exams conducted by SPPU, among which 2 lakh students have chosen the online option while 50,000 students appeared offline at 113 examination centres.
On Monday, 29,236 students were expected to appear for the online exams and 4,881 students for offline exams among which 17,118 students successfully completed the online examination and 1,811 students appeared for the offline exams at various centres.
Meanwhile, several offline subject papers were delayed at the centres in Pune city. The first paper which was scheduled at 10am actually began at 12.30pm. While another scheduled paper at 1pm began at 2.30pm at various examination centres in the city.
“Today’s paper was quite tough, initially there was a problem in reading the questions as they were not clear. Only four options of the questions were seen on the screen, but the question was not there. Then the issue got resolved and I solved the questions, some of them were easy but some were tough,” said Sandeep Mandave, a final year bachelor of arts student who gave the exam online.
For the offline exams, 113 centres have been identified where physical exams were conducted in Pune, Nashik, and Ahmednagar districts.
The mock test and question paper sets for practice were released on October 8. The exams are of 50 marks with multiple-choice questions (MCQ) for a duration of one hour.
Ketaki Rathi, who appeared for the exam offline at the SP college said, “Our paper was scheduled at 10am in the morning and so I reached the college at 9am, whereas we had to wait till 12 noon when the actual process of the test started. There was complete mismanagement seen and it was already risky for students to come and give the exams in such a crisis situation. The SPPU should resolve all the technical and other issues for further exams.”
SPPU vice-chancellor Nitin Karmalkar said, “There was no issue in the online exams and in the first half more than 5,000 students successfully appeared for the exam. But for the offline exams at some of the centres there were some technical issues due to which it got delayed. We have worked on solutions to the problems faced today and from tomorrow there won’t be any problem.”
