AMU Administration has finally decided to postpone the end-term examinations.
While the students were still buried in mid-semester, sessionals, project work and tutorial assignment submissions, on 7th June 2021 a notice was circulated announcing end-term vivas for all subjects to be conducted from 12th June 2021.
This notice led to students protesting and boycotting the exams through various online mediums. The students wrote to the Chairman (Professor, Zaheer Uddin) requesting the cancellation of the viva voce examinations as it would extremely hard for students to prepare all subjects on such short notice. The letter (attached below) sent was endorsed by more than 500 students which read –
“ Apart from the number of students who have been suffering from the disease themselves, there are a large number of students who are the lone attendants of multiple family members admitted to hospitals. In other cases, students have just lost their dear ones to the pandemic and are in a state of shock and grief. In some other cases, students have lost multiple members of their families, immediate or extended. Even students who have not faced any direct loss are suffering on account of their friends’ distress and suffering. And at the risk of their own health, many students have been engaged in relief efforts throughout….
While we can still put in some effort to submit assignments, preparing an entire semester’s worth of syllabus for a viva is difficult for most of us, for the reasons outlined above.”
Taking into consideration all the student grievances and the BCI Guidelines (Press Release dated 10.06.2021), an urgent meeting was held by the Faculty members.
Speaking to SCC, one of the Faculty members present in the meeting said-
” There were two opinions that emerged in the meeting-
- One was to give an option to the students to appear for the online exams or prefer the home assignments
- And the second was to have evaluation done only through the home assignment.
A unanimous decision was taken in the favour of the latter.
Another point of discussion was whether there shall be a last date for submitting the home assignments, on contemplation two opinions emerged on this issue as well –
- One was to give a particular date on which assignments of all subjects would be submitted together
- The other was to provide a schedule in which the submission date for each subject assignment would be separately provided
It was finally decided in favour of the latter that there shall be a different date for submission of assignments related to every subject.”
Thus, amongst the various options provided by the BCI i.e. Online/Offline/Blended/Online Open Book Exam (OBE)/ Assignment Based Evaluation (ABE)/Research papers, after deliberated discussion the University has opted for the written assignment based model of evaluation.
