Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Semester exam results to trickle in

Thiruvananthapuram: After what seemed to be an interminable delay, the first results of the choice-based credit-and-semester examinations will, in all likelihood, be published on Monday.

Officials supervising the publication of the results told The Hindu here on Saturday that the results of the B.Com. examinations would be declared first.

“The examination board for the B.Sc. examinations is scheduled to meet on April 25. So the B.Sc. results may be out by the end of April,” a senior university official said.

The results of the BA examinations will be out only in May. This, sources said, is on account of the large number of students who wrote the examinations and the mistakes in the internal assessment marks sent to the university by the colleges.

Tabulation

The tabulation of the results of all these examinations is taking place at the university. It is the employees of the examination wing who are doing the work; earlier, the university had to troubleshoot a standoff between these employees and those of the Computer Centre over who would carry out the tabulation of the scores.

The first-semester examinations got over in December 2010 and if the regulations were followed, the results should have been published 45 days later. However, right from the word go, the valuation of the answer sheets was beset with problems.

The university decided to set up centralised valuation camps in three places, but opted not to emulate Mahatma Gandhi University in shutting down colleges for a week or so to ensure adequate presence of teachers at these camps. This assumes significance given that the classes for the annual-stream degree courses are being held along with the semester classes at all universities across the State.

The result was an acute shortage of teachers at the camps. The camp at Alappuzha was short of 53 teachers, an unbridgeable gap. In desperation, the university decided to rope in retired teachers for evaluation duty, raising many an academic eyebrow and giving rise to concerns about the quality of the evaluation. Retired teachers, many academics pointed out, never handled the semester classes. How can they be expected to do justice to the evaluation of these answer sheets?

That was not all. Anxious to speed up the valuation process, the university cajoled and pressed teachers to take home bundles of answer sheets; some teachers reportedly got answer sheets in the hundreds.

There was also talk among teachers of an “informal directive” to evaluators to be liberal with the grades they awarded. Though top officials of the university told The Hindu that no such directive had gone from the university, concerns were raised among many academics about the quality and accuracy of the evaluation.

So, has the university learnt any lessons from its “first-semester travails”? Pro Vice-Chancellor J. Prabhash, in charge of examinations, told The Hindu on Saturday that steps would be taken to ensure that the results of the second-semester examinations were published on schedule.

“We are even considering shutting down colleges for a week to 10 days so that there would be adequate number of teachers at the valuation camps. Anyhow, the post-examination situation of the second semester would not be a repetition of what happened now,” he said.

For the students, long used to disconnect between schedules on paper and what actually happens in the university, seeing will be believing.

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