PG students to waste entire semester as MU extends admissions deadline again

Postgraduate students pursuing courses at the University of Mumbai are likely to end their first semester without attending a single lecture, as the deadline for admission has been extended til September 25.

Even as it faces flak over delayed results and missing answer sheets, the university has once again deferred admissions to postgraduate courses at affiliated colleges. Students are worried about wasting an entire semester as colleges are scheduled to shut down for Diwali vacations in October, leaving just two weeks for completion of the admissions process and starting MA, MCom and LLM classes before the break for vacations.

“First the delay in starting assessment of papers, then delay in announcement of results and the same has affected postgraduate admissions; it’s a never-ending downward spiral,” said the principal of a suburban college. With the admission deadline pushed to September 25, colleges are worried that they won’t get to start lectures before the first week of October. “We’ll have to break for Diwali vacations starting mid-October. So technically, students have lost an entire semester of academic time due to the delay in announcing results,” he added.

While the original deadline for postgraduate admissions was August 21, the same has been postponed twice already and on Saturday, the university decided push back the dates again to September 25. “What’s the use of postponing admissions if the university is still struggling to announce all pending results? Rather, let colleges start lectures for students on the basis of provisional admission instead of wasting academic time,” said another principal. She added that while extra lectures in vacations could be the way out, many teachers are not keen to give up their holidays once again. “Many have worked through the May holidays as well as the Ganesh festival break and to expect them to work during Diwali holidays will be unfair,” she added.

In some cases where colleges have managed to fill up more than 50% seats in post graduate courses have decided to start lectures for those students starting this week. “It makes no sense to wait for another week or so to start lectures, especially since the university has already declared dates for MA examinations even before their admissions are done,” said Anju Kapoor, principal of UPG College, Vile Parle. Tentative exam dates have been shared by the university and MA/MCom exams by the last week of December or early January.

For the time being, the university is hoping to clear all pending results soon, however, there’s still no word about the 28,000 missing answer scripts.

More than three months after the on-screen marking (OSM) assessment of answer scripts of lakhs of students began, officials from University of Mumbai (MU) are searching for “misplaced” answer booklets. They claim the answer sheets could be lying in a warehouse, misplaced in the assessment software or lost altogether.

Online assessment of all MU exams conducted between March and May this year began in mid-May. Answer scripts were first scanned at the examination house situated in MU’s Kalina campus, after which they were uploaded on the assessment software as per subject codes and made available to teachers for assessment. Right from the start, teachers complained about receiving answer papers with the wrong subject code or in another language under their log-in ID.