Day 6: NU finally clears online test, 23,715 appear for exams

Nagpur: The teething troubles for Nagpur University in holding it’s first online examination seem to be over as the varsity, after five days of chaos and confusion, managed to conduct the multiple choice questions (MCQ) test of nearly 24,000 students seamlessly on the sixth day on Wednesday.
The examinees included over 11,000 engineering students who had faced problems in paper submission on Monday.
The varsity helplines, which rang continuously for the first five days of the examination due to one or the other issues, were mostly silent on Wednesday, as a majority of examinees hardly faced any difficulties. The attendance in most of the faculties, except arts, was over 98% and average was over 95%.
Some examinees, particularly from rural areas, did face problems due to low connectivity.
“Five students from Gumgaon in Nagpur district couldn’t appear due to network problems. We received some complaints from students who inadvertently clicked on mock test option in the Pariksha app. We then removed that data and allowed them to log in again. Barring these, we hardly faced any issues today. The number of complaints dropped drastically,” a relaxed Board of Examination and Evaluation (BOEE) director Prafulla Sable told TOI.
An official from Promarc Software, which is facing ire of students and NU’s present and former statutory members on social media, due to the initial fiasco, told TOI that its staffers worked till Tuesday midnight to fine-tune the system.
“We did server code optimization by changing some settings. These changes were done in different parameters. We didn’t increase server capacity as is speculated. Our server never reached its full capacity during the earlier five papers,” he said.
The official added reducing the size of images received from examinees’ mobiles through proctoring helped streamline the process. “Earlier, the server was receiving high resolution images that were blocking the traffic. We’ve now filtered these, as we don’t need such big size images for proctoring,” he said.
TOI received a couple of complaints from students claiming that their civil engineering paper was “out of syllabus”. The exam director, however, rejected the charge saying the question paper was set by accommodating all three combinations — easy, moderate and difficult.
“It means 40% questions are easier, 40% moderate and 20% difficult. This is a normal pattern of any exam. The students may have found some questions difficult to answer. They can still lodge a complaint with the exam section, if they wish to,” said Sable.
On Thursday as well, a large number of examinees would appear in online exams. “About 9,000 commerce students will appear in the first shift, followed by 8,000 in science and other courses on Thursday. We’re hoping for another smooth day like today,” he said.
Only 3 students opted for offline exams
Out of over 75,000 final-year students, only three have opted for offline exams citing that they didn’t have mobile.
“An NGO has approached us for helping them out and in a couple of days, it plans to handover mobile handsets to these students so that they too could appear in online exams. All of them hail from rural areas. We weren’t expecting such a low number for offline exams,” Sable told TOI.
In neighbouring Amravati district, over 5,500 students have preferred pen-and-paper exams over MCQ tests.
Status of NU online exams on 6th day
Shift -------------- Faculty------------ Enrolled ------------------ Appeared ----------%
1st ------------- Commerce --------- 2,373 ---------------------- 2,355 --------------- 99.24%
2nd ------------- Arts ----------------- 9,489 ----------------------8,652 ---------------- 91.17%
3rd ------------- Science ------------- 1,530 --------------------- 1,504 ---------------- 98.3%
4th ------------- Engg & Tech ------- 11,335-------------------- 11,204 --------------- 98.84%
Total ------------------------------------ 24,727------------------- 23,715 --------------- 95.90%