‘NTA aims to set up own centres, CUET should be glitch-free in coming days’

UGC chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar cites three major reasons that led to widespread glitches and cancellations or postponement in the CUET-UG 2022 and tells TOI’s Manash Gohain that the problem of ill-equipped exam centres will be sorted out soon. Excerpts from the interview:
What were the reasons behind the glitches that plagued CUET-UG-22 ?
JEE or NEET are based on only a few subjects and typically they are held over a day or a few days. CUET on the other hand is very diverse. For the first time students are being given so many choices in a single exam. Because of the multiplicity of choices, we cannot conduct this exam in one or two days. Cancellation of examinations happens in some cases where there are floods. The second session on August 4 was cancelled across the country because the file size was too large leading to unexpected delays and students had to wait until five o'clock. Students were stressed, therefore we postponed it. But we learnt a lesson that we need to upload the question papers in advance. Some glitches happened in a few centres because of local network issues. We have reviewed and have taken enough precautions and you might have seen since Wednesday there were no such issues.

You also spoke about sabotage in the exam?
After committing to host the exams, some centres went back on their word. So there were such cases which we are taking very seriously. This is kind of wilful negligence. Also like in the previous years, a few individuals attempted to take advantage by using electronic gadgets or by having a proxy to write the exam. But even earlier, we have stopped such things from happening. In the coming days the exam should go on without any issue.

All aspirants didn’t get their first preference of centres. On top of that they are being informed of the centres just two days before the exam.

I completely agree, students should not be inconvenienced and they should not be burdened with things like travelling. That’s the reason why NTA is trying its best to meet the first preference in terms of city. In some cases, where the centres dropped out at the last minute, we tried our best to arrange another centre. But if that was not available then we had to arrange it in a nearby city or town. In such cases, the NTA is informing the candidates via email, text messages and phone calls. But now we have taken enough precautions. Even if there is a shift, we would like to inform the students at least three or four days before the exams.



Why select ill-equipped centres with old computers and where connectivity is poor?

Colleges which are approved by the AICTE and the council are identifying these centres. We are also approaching good private colleges and have also contacted all the central universities, some of which are coming forward. But the number of students who will be writing will increase in future. Therefore, NTA is also working on establishing centres so that these centres can be used throughout the year.

Is the vendor also to blame for the technical glitches?

The vendor provides the software, which is deployed in the server computers where the students write examinations. The responses are captured by the software and stored in the server locally. All these responses are uploaded to a central server and they will finally come to NTA for the result processing. So the software is very mature. The challenge for us is to identify centres which are geographically equally distributed so that they are more accessible and whether there are enough working computers and whether they have good internet connectivity.