Nagpur: It was on the cards ever since Nagpur University shifted its winter-2020 examination from app to web-link based. On Thursday afternoon, technical glitches and server errors forced NU to cancel all the papers scheduled for the day but later the university claimed it managed to hold papers for 5,000 students in the evening after fixing the bug.
About 10,000 students were supposed to appear for the exams on Thursday.
On October 8 last year, when students appeared for the first paper of summer-2020 exams, they too faced similar problems as the system failed to send OTP on their smartphones after login, thus forcing a majority of them to miss the exams.
TOI had on Thursday reported about students and teachers complaining about web-link based exams stating that they weren’t familiar with it and it also requires high speed internet connectivity, which is extremely difficult in rural and some remote areas of the city.
Vice-chancellor Subhash Chaudhari told TOI in the afternoon that when he reviewed the situation, he found that one after another technical problems are cropping up. “We also came to know that the server wasn’t properly configured and students were facing numerous software glitches. Therefore, I directed the Examination Section officials to cancel today’s papers to avoid further confusion,” he said.
Chaudhari clarified that the papers would be rescheduled midway during the exam schedule or after the end of the papers.
However, in the evening, the VC called TOI informing that NU had fixed the technical bug in its servers and over 5,000 students had successfully logged in and solved the papers till 8pm.
“As we had kept the system open, students tried to login and they are solving the papers right now. We have received confirmation of about 5,000 examinees in the system. We will think about whether to grant another chance to them, as they had successfully logged in and many have also submitted their papers. As the system has been shifted from app to web-based link, we need to change a lot of features,” said the VC.
The papers of BSc, BCom and BBA fifth semester were scheduled in the first shift from 8am to 9am, BE seventh and BSc (Home Sci) fifth semesters were slotted from 9am to 10am, and BA and BA LLB fifth semesters from 10am to 11am. However, the problems started cropping up from the first paper in the morning.
In the morning when TOI called Board of Examination and Evaluation (BOEE) director Prafulla Sable after receiving numerous complaints from the aggrieved students and their parents, the latter said only a few were facing problems due to poor connectivity issues.
“We had already made it clear to the examinees that they would need 5 MBPS speed for desktops, laptops and tablets and 1 MBPS for mobile,” said Sable.
Endorsing Sable, the VC told TOI in the afternoon that reexam would be held for students those who couldn’t appear in the papers. Both he and Sable categorically had denied any chances of cancelling the exams in the morning hours.
However, after complaints started jumping, a decision to cancel the entire set of Thursday’s paper was taken in the afternoon.
# Flip-flop on Thursday
* NU started online papers on mobiles, desktops, laptops & tablets at 8am
* Students started facing difficulties right from login to accessing questions
* A majority of them were unable to open papers, as system showed errors
* Some managed to login but the system hanged after few answers
* Few complained about receiving total blank screen after repeated login attempts
* Initially, BoEE director Prafulla Sable & VC said servers didn’t crash
* They denied plans to cancel exam, said very few are facing difficulties
* With complaints pouring in, VC decided to cancel all Thursday’s papers
* VC decided to reschedule them midway or at end
* BoEE director issued notification about cancellation
* Blamed server configuration and other technical bugs for clogging system
* By 6pm, Promarc technicians managed to clear the bug in the system
* NU claims about 5K students successfully logged in and solved papers till 8pm