15 minutes early start to stagger load in NU online exams

Nagpur: The Nagpur University (NU) on Sunday decided to make the question paper available in its ‘Pariksha App’ 15 minutes before scheduled start of each exam to. This will stagger the student load on servers and prevent glitches which have been encountered in the last three days. Whatever time the exam starts, students will get only an hour to solve the paper.
On Monday, the first exam of Master in Industrial Research is scheduled to start at 9.30am but as per the new move, the question paper will be available at 9.15am. This will prevent the sudden rush at one time and slowing down of the app. A timer will ensure the exam ends as per given duration of one hour. Likewise, papers for 11.30am, 1.30pm and 3.30pm would also be available early.
Over 10,000 students — highest since October 8 — are expected to appear in 49 online exams on Monday. Of these, 8,000 are from Bachelor of Engineering, which is the biggest faculty in NU. The 17 BE subjects exam, scheduled at 3.30pm, would be a big test for NU officials too.
Number of examinees will touch 22,000 per day as the delayed Summer 2020 exam advances. English language exam will alone see 10,000 students in the coming days.
On the first day of online exams, one time password (OTP) had posed major problems in logging into the app and forced the university to get rid of it. There was a server crash the next day leading to cancellation of all exams of the day. Students are still confused if they still need OTP.
Board of Examinations and Evaluation director Prafulla Sabale told TOI that students need to update the App daily. “We are still getting calls for OTP and we are counselling students to update the app,” he said.
The exam director was hopeful the server will function well now. “We observed maximum students logging at the scheduled time of exam. Slow internet speed at their end complicates the issue. Hence, we have decided to make the paper available 15 minutes early, so that there is no jamming and exam starts in small batches,” he said.
Still, if any student is unable to attempt the online exam, offline exam will be held after completion of all online exams.
Sabale said issues regarding selection of medium too have been resolved.
He also said that of the 1,661 total examinees in Saturday’s exam, 1,460 entered in first three minutes taking the server usage to 24%. The remaining students logged in next 10 minutes of scheduled time.