Conducting online exams for arrear students challenging

Due to COVID threat, the State government had announced cancellation of arrear exams for students of State-run colleges, in September. Higher education institutions declared all-pass by calculating marks based on internal assessment and past semester exam performance. Evaluations were done accordingly, and results were published in October. 

However, legal challenge to the move and objection from All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the State government told the court that it would conduct arrear exams shortly. 

According to N Pasupathy, president, Association of University Teachers (AUT), the government do not have appropriate technology to conduct online exams and cautioned that there were chances of irregularities, including mass copying. 

S Lakshmanan, head of IT department at a private college in the city, pointed out that proctored exam software, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) based system, monitors student’s activities, including their eyes, to prevent them indulging in irregularities during exams. 

“Taking photos or recording videos and sharing it with others or indulging in suspicious and objectionable activities during the examination will be automatically recorded and will be treated as malpractice,” he explained. 

A senior official from the Higher Education Department, seeking anonymity, said question papers would be uploaded in a portal just one hour before the exam. From there, it could be downloaded by students who would write the answers manually on A4 sheets and convert them into a PDF or any text file, which would be uploaded. 

Explaining the issues that had cropped up during online exams for regular students, the official said, “Uploading answer sheets from mobile phones is time consuming. If internet connection gets cut, the students have to upload the answer sheets again,” 

There were also complaints from authorities that the number of answer sheets and the figures given by students had mismatch.