The third-year students of Delhi University's Spanish Department had to go through 90 minutes of anxiety when their Semester V paper did not appear on their online exam dashboard. The Exams Department could not find the paper either and contacted the teachers, said a source. The paper was only available at 10.30 am for the exam that was originally scheduled for 9 am, after the teachers re-sent the question paper.
But this is not something that has happened for the first time, said teachers. "This exact issue has occurred yesterday when a student clearing their backlog has not found the paper and we had to send it again," said Dr Vijaya Venkataraman, who teaches Spanish at the university. "This is a crisis and they are not dealing with it. The university should come up with a better solution for this. We can't put the students under so much pressure every time they have to sit for an exam. It's a complete failure of the system. They were not able to bring out the results of the exam held in August properly, how can they compound that crisis by organising yet another mammoth OBE?" asked the professor.
What is the alternative, you ask? The teachers have a solution to offer. "We have been conducting classes online for quite some time now and are now comfortable with the Google Classroom or even Zoom. We have periodical tests on these platforms and the outcome is satisfactory. We can always have a centralised question paper which can be evaluated on a college level. It makes the process smoother and efficient," said Dr Abha Dev Habib, Professor of Physics at Miranda House. The administration has not yet said why the glitches have happened or why the question papers were not with the Exam Department.
