The Hindu : Front Page : Distance education students awaiting results for four months

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Friday, May 02, 2008
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Distance education students awaiting results for four months

Priscilla Jebaraj

High enrolment, teacher shortage cause of delay
Complaints of poor response from Madras varsity

CHENNAI: Over 12,000 post-graduate students enrolled in Madras University’s distance education programme are entering the fifth month of waiting for the publication of their results. The university says high enrolment and a scarcity of evaluators are causing the delay.

“We finished our exams by the end of December, and expected to get the results by mid-February,” says a first-year MBA student. The results for undergraduate students were published three weeks ago. But the MBA and M.Sc. Computer Science students are still waiting.

One student, who works at a well-known software company in the city, says the delay is costing her a promotion. Another M.Sc Computer science student has not been able to apply for his M.Phil this year, since the M.Sc results have been delayed.

Students are upset over the lack of communication from the university. “They rarely pick up the helpline number. They keep saying it will come in 20 days and then when we ask again after 25 days, they say they have not even begun the evaluation yet,” says a student.

The shortage of evaluators is the problem, a senior University official said. “Usually, we have about 60-70,000 scripts [for MBA students alone]. This year, we have one lakh scripts…But the number of teachers willing to do evaluation has fallen from over 150 to just about 50 or 60 this year,” he said.

“Earlier, we were paying only Rs. 9 per paper. But we have revised the fee to Rs. 12 with retrospective effect from April 2007…,” said the official.

However, the other reason for the shortage is the fact that many colleges with management departments have become deemed universities or autonomous institutions over the last year or so. “Their management is obviously not willing to let them do evaluation work during working hours,” said an official.

There are only about 40 government and non-autonomous institutions with management departments affiliated to the university. The official said the Vice-Chancellor had written to the principals of these colleges, asking them to ensure that teachers are available to evaluate the next set of papers from this month’s semester examinations. “We want to finish evaluation within 20 days,” he said.

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