Bihar: Six-member VCs’ panel likely to meet on Friday

PATNA: A six-member committee of vice-chancellors (VCs) formed by governor-cum-chancellor Phagu Chauhan is likely to meet on Friday to suggest ways for ensuring smooth conduct of examinations amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Members of the panel include Ranjit Kumar Verma (Munger University), Rajesh Singh (Purnea University), Gulab Chand Ram Jaiswal (Patliputra University), H N Prasad (Nalanda Open University), Rajendra Prasad (Magadh University) and Hanuman Prasad Pandey (Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar Bihar University).
According to Raj Bhavan sources, the committee will discuss all the aspects related to the conduct of examinations under the existing circumstances, maintaining the norms of social distancing and ensuring proper sanitization of the exam centres. It will also consider the guidelines of the University Grants Commission (UGC) in this regard.
Recently, the UGC had announced that the universities should hold only the final year examinations of different courses with all preventive measures and that the students of intermediary batches and semesters should be promoted to the next class on the basis of their internal assessment.
The VCs of some universities had earlier suggested that exams of shorter duration with less number of questions should be conducted. Some others had also favoured the idea of holding objective-type tests on OMR sheets to ensure publication of results on time and regularization of delayed academic sessions.
Although Patna University, Munger University and Aryabhatta Knowledge University have already announced the examination schedules of some courses, they are waiting for a go-ahead signal from the chancellor’s secretariat.
This issue was raised at a meeting of the VCs with the chancellor on June 15 in which the latter had announced that an advisory committee of VCs would be constituted soon to recommend steps for bringing in uniformity in the examination system of all the universities in the state. He had directed the VCs to hold all the pending exams of the last academic sessions and publish their results in September-October.
“The exam schedules and academic calendars of the universities should be reorganized in such a manner that the next academic session may commence right on time. The UGC guidelines related to Covid-19, which have already been sent to the universities on April 29, should be followed strictly,” the chancellor had told the VCs.