Over 5,000 Nagpur University students miss exams due to login and connectivity issues

NAGPUR: After successfully conducting a majority of its online papers, Nagpur University (NU) was again rocked by technical glitches this week that prevented over 5,000 students from appearing in the examinations. The papers of BA, BCom and BSc first semester were scheduled this week, but a majority of them were marred by complaints from distressed students, who failed to login in the system.
The NU Board of Examination and Evaluation (BOEE) quickly took a decision to conduct re-exam of all aggrieved examinees. They, however, need to lodge a written complaint within three days with their respective college principals, who in turn will forward them to the NU Exam Section.
“Actually, the issue wasn’t from our side. These students were appearing for the exams for the first time and therefore weren’t familiar with the login system. They made several mistakes while filling up their credentials during login. Many of them, particularly from the rural areas, faced connectivity issues. We would give them another chance to appear in papers,” BOEE director Prafulla Sable told TOI.
After receiving scores of complaints, NU once again dispatched the video link prepared by the director detailing steps on how to login for the paper. “I’ve sent it to all principals and also told them to train their students on this aspect. Many students failed to enter captcha, as they weren’t aware of that. Since it was their first paper, they committed mistakes. But today, the same students appeared and they successfully solved the paper. Over 22,000 have enrolled for the BA exams and 14,000 for BSc, which constitutes the largest chunk for our winter-2020 exams,” the BOEE director added.
The difficulties started cropping up from Tuesday, when over a thousand students appearing in the BA Geography paper weren’t able to connect to the system. The trend followed over the next two days during the papers for BA, BCom, BSc (IT and Home Science), BCCA and others. As per the examinees, they were under the impression that the colleges would send them an exam link, instead of the university and kept waiting for it.
“In their hall-tickets, the name of the subject and online link is mentioned clearly, but they failed to notice it. However, only 5,000 students out of 68,000 who appeared this week had complained, which isn’t a big number. Apprehending these difficulties, we had started our papers with few examinees from May 27 and eventually increased it to 68,000. Earlier, we conducted exams of engineering students, but didn’t face such issues,” Sable said.