Promotion move to benefit 80k ATKT students

Nagpur: A day after Maharashtra government decided to promote even failure (ATKT) students due to Covid-19 pandemic, it came to fore that Nagpur University (NU) has about 80,000 students who would benefit from the decision. This number is more than the regular final year students, who are about 75,000. The state has over 3 lakh students having a backlog in subjects.
“We are yet to receive any formal notification, but we are ready with the figures of such students. Many of them have backlog of third, fourth and fifth semesters. In each of them, we’ve approximately 25,000 or more students. So, the total number is around 80,000,” pro-vice chancellor (officiating) SR Chaudhary told TOI.
NU officials, including VC (acting) Murlidhar Chandekar, pro-VC and others convened an informal meeting on Friday to discuss the government decision. Other issues like stalemate over final year exams also came up for discussions.
After UGC issued guidelines for universities, making it compulsory to conduct exams in September, state higher and technical education minister Uday Samant rushed a letter to the apex body and Union HRD Ministry. He expressed inability to conduct the exams in view of the surge in coronavirus cases every day in Maharashtra.
“We don’t have clarity on final year exams, but we’re fully prepared either way. If asked to conduct, we will be doubling the exam centres and our question papers are ready. If average marks are to be awarded, we’ve our software ready. Internal and previous semester marks of students are already saved in the server,” Chaudhary said.
On the problem of syllabus not being completed in majority of colleges due to nationwide lockdown from March 25, the pro-VC said, “In normal course, about 80% of the curriculum is completed by colleges by March-end, as exams commence from April.”
“We believe that most colleges should have completed 80% syllabus. Only difficulty is of professional courses like engineering, whose syllabus isn’t finished. In such cases, we would allow them to solve 40% questions and not the 70% in normal times. But all these decisions would be finalized by the Academic Council only,” he clarified.
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Acad Council meet after July 20 to declare results
The pro-VC said NU would convene an emergent meeting of Academic Council, likely after July 20, to discuss the formalities of releasing all results, except final year. “Since guidelines are clear for first and second years, we’ve devised a formula of awarding marks. It needs clearance from the Academic Council. After its nod, we only need to upload the internal marks, which were sent by colleges and results would be out in a week,” he said.