NTA's Director General responds to student protests over CUET 'snags' even as issues continue to crop up
The Director General reiterated the statement made by the Chairman of the UGC that the CUET was a 'mammoth' exercise and that the NTA is doing its best to address student grievances
Each fresh day of the Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate students seems to embroil a larger number of students in an uncertain future, thanks to the technical and administrative issues that have plagued the exam.
Phase II of CUET UG is underway and, despite statements from the Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) that made CUET mandatory for admission into central universities in India from this year and the Director-General of the National Testing Agency (NTA), students do not seem reassured.
Twitter user Sanjana Shrivastava, who claims that she is a CUET UG aspirant, tweeted that her centre was changed on the day of the exam on August 4. When she did reach the centre, she found that technical issues had delayed the start of the exam. However, when she began attempting the test, she found that some sections stopped appearing on the screen. The exam was then cancelled for her, she says.
Thousands of such reports have been pouring in from multiple students in the last week. Shift II was cancelled across all 489 centres on August 4, which was day one of Phase II. In the following days as well, exams continued to be cancelled in various centres across the country. In a press statement on Sunday, August 7, the UGC Chairman, M Jagadesh Kumar, said that there were reports of "sabotage" at some of the centres and, following these reports, the NTA "swung into action" to cancel the exams.
The NTA had rescheduled the exams that were cancelled due to technical issues to be conducted between August 12-14. However, it has now further rescheduled the dates and set the postponed exams to be conducted between August 24-28. The NTA said that this was being done to avoid clashes with other exams such as the CBSE Class XII improvement exams.
In the press statement, the Chairman said, “Cancellation of the test in some centres was done keeping the best interests of the students in mind. The NTA is constantly in touch with the students through email, messaging and voicemail to keep them informed of the changes and extra care is being taken in this regard.”
Student representatives from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad staged a protest today, August 8, at the office of the NTA in New Delhi. During the protest, the Director General of the NTA, Vineet Joshi, stepped out to meet the protesting students. When faced with allegations of "mismanagement", the DG said to the protesting students, "We have conducted exams for lakhs of students in the last three years and have not faced any such issues. This time with the CUET, more than 14 lakh students are sitting for the exam. Every student has been given the option to select up to 10 subjects to write the exam in. In order to avoid any clash between dates for each subject, we have worked hard. The exam is being conducted in 13 languages for the convenience of the students. And in order to help students, we have set up centres in small cities and towns as well."
Students gathered at the protest raised the issue of information on the change of centres being communicated to the students only the day before the exam. Students also claimed that NTA officials did not respond to their grievances either via e-mail or on call. A student also claimed that at one centre, the examination officials asked girl students to share their Instagram IDs.
Unsatisfied with the DG's response, the students accused the NTA of making excuses even as thousands of students deal with an uncertain future. Joshi countered that he wasn't making excuses.
In an attempt to address these concerns, the Chairman of the UGC had said in his statement to the media, "More school teachers are being deployed as they have more experience of dealing with the students with empathy. Due to the efforts and corrective actions taken by NTA, we are hopeful that in the coming days, the CUET-UG will be conducted smoothly."
Issues with the exam, removed from the technical and administrative glitches, continue to crop up. Twitter user Aditya Shukla, who claims he wrote the CUET-UG test in Sociology, says that all questions were out of the syllabus. "All questions came from PSYCHOLOGY. Do something Sir It's matter of 200 marks," he writes in a tweet, addressing Vineet Joshi and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Another Twitter user, Ajay Singh, also makes the same claim in his tweet, "CUET-UG 2022 5TH AUGUST 2nd SLOT: In the sociology paper, all the questions were asked from psychology...we have been trying to reach out to @DG_NTA but they're not responding... please help
