DUTA wrote letter to VC against Online Book Examination

Letter wrote to VC by DUTA

Prof Yoegesh Tyagi
Vice Chancellor
DU
Sir,
We have been consistently writing you over the online examinations and handpicked working group for examination citing statutory violations, sidelining students’ interest, cyber security issues and arbitrary and authoritarian decision making, but the university administration is moving ahead with its own predetermined agenda ignoring those correspondences. Merely after two days of inviting the suggestions from the stakeholders, the university administration shoots a letter on 13th May 2020 to all HoDs for preparing 3 sets of question papers for open book examinations. For the university administration, are the HoDs outside the purview of the stakeholders and merely implementer of such an order? It is a matter of serious concern that there was no discussion with the HoDs before this letter was dispatched as an ‘order’. Has the administration tried to ascertain the problems faced by HoDs owing to this pandemic and lockdown? This letter to HoDs is an attempt to coerce them to conduct the exam on dictated lines without having any discussion with them.

This unilateral move to organise remote open book Exams to be attempted at home by the students of Delhi University will push the higher education towards privatization by devaluing it’s degrees and dilute their rigour. The pedagogy of DU and it’s Examination system are neither structured nor cultivated for open book examinations and those too to be taken at one’s home. Open book and close book systems are two completely different thing. The requirements of question-papers are also different for those two systems. And open book systems cannot be a substitute to close book system or general examination meant for evaluating level and depth of a student. There is common practice for giving assignments in higher education system which is nothing but a type of open book examination. It is not appropriate to implement the same for general examination system. In many papers of Science subjects, there are derivations, numerical or chemical equations, where finding questions out of books and notes is extremely difficult. There are certain papers in some courses which are totally based on practicals.

This arbitrary fiddling with our sacrosanct long nurtured Examination system in the name of Covid should be stopped.The entire academic community for their salt would agree that this Open Book Examination from Home would prove worse than an academic Covid for the students and the Higher Education itself.

The Students are not trained/ taught for these types of questions. Secondly, they have taken admission in a examination scheme and now the scheme can not be changed suddenly and arbitrarily midway. Thirdly, we have three fourth of students coming from SC, ST, OBC, EWS, PWD and remote areas like NE & JK, who are mostly on the wrong side of digital divide.

As the proposal is coming in a very secretive manner without going to any statutory body, there are apprehensions about cybersecurity and financial aspects also. How can UFM be defined in this proposed system? How can impersonation be checked? More than one students can submit same answer-sheets while changing their personal details on first page, which can be done on picture editing software. For the proposed system, the mobile phone is not sufficient and laptop/desktop is required. What will happen in case a student does not have a laptop/desktop? These are some of the concerns which we received from the teachers.

We request you not to change the pattern of examination to open-book mode and deal with the matters of examinations as per the rules and regulations of DU.

Regards
Rajpal Singh, Advocate, Member DU Court
Seema Das
Richa Raj
Sudhanshu Kumar
Pradeep Kumar
Member AC
JL Gupta
Rajesh Jha
Member EC