Every Year on Exam Process
Mihika Basu
It’s taken three years for Mumbai University to realise they have been wasting as much as Rs 15 lakh every year on setting question papers and readying practicals for 84 courses that have no candidates during the annual examinations.
The candidates drop out mid-course.
So this year, the university – which announced a venture capital scheme in
its 2007-08 budget and is eyeing a listing in the Bombay Stock Exchange,
hoping to raise funds for various upgrades and projects – will declare the
84 courses “dormant”.
Among those courses are: Bachelor of Heritage Management, MPhil in Defence
and Strategic Studies, ME (Civil) in Traffic and Transport Engineering,
Diploma in Industrial Engineering, Diploma in Environmental Pollution
Analysis and Control, Diploma in Food Processing and Preservation etc.
“Instead of spending money unnecessarily, we will prepare the question
papers only if we have students registering for such subjects and
subsequently the exams,” says Pro Vice-Chancellor A D Sawant.
University officials say the fault lies with the colleges, which send a list
of students after admissions but do not update it before the exams. And that’s
been happening year after year.
So why didn’t the university act earlier? “We were hoping that some students
would turn up. But it appears they drop out,” says an official.
“We will soon issue a notification whereby all colleges will have to
intimate the university by a certain date about the number of candidates who
have registered for a particular subject if any, subsequent to which we will
initiate the examination process,” says Sawant.
“For each exam, we had to prepare three sets of question papers which were
never used because there were no students,” says another university
official. The Rs 15 lakh, says the official, was spent on the entire exam
process – scheduling, preparing questions and the timetable, coding and
decoding and readying the final set of question papers, and appointment and
utilisation of manpower.
URL : http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=229752