Bangalore University’s (BU) academic council, at its meeting on Tuesday, voted for common parameters across the State universities to award internal assessment (IA) marks to students. The proposal will be mooted at the next meeting of the Karnataka State Higher Education Council, Vice-Chancellor (VC) B. Thimme Gowda said.
The proposal was a result of a discussion on the postgraduate (PG) admission process. Many members pointed to anomalies in the process of awarding IA marks at the undergraduate level, due to which students from autonomous colleges had higher percentage of marks compared to those from affiliated colleges (BU awards grades for IA, not marks). Members pointed out that during PG admissions, no one sees which university the student is from; they only see the final percentage.
Allegations
Allegations ranging from owners of private colleges awarding “favourable marks” to show good results in their colleges to “victimisation” of students through the process flew freely. However, most of members agreed that the IA was necessary as students cannot be assessed through just one exam. Even the VC admitted that the semester system without IA would lapse into the annual scheme.
M.K. Sridhar, reader in BU’s Canara Bank School of Management Studies, said continuous assessment had been introduced even at the school level through the Right to Education (RTE) Act, but admitted that complaints of misuse were true. “We need to bring experts to make IA more scientific, unbiased and comprehensive and teachers too need to be trained,” he suggested.
In the end, this suggestion was accepted and the council resolved to constitute an expert committee to explore the possibility of implementing common IA parameters for all university students. “But this may be implemented only in the next academic year,” Prof. Gowda said, and added that the possibility of BU conducting an entrance exam for PG admissions could not be ruled out.
Re-evaluation
The council also agreed to amend the Examination Ordinance issued in 2011, following which students who have scored less than 15 marks can also apply for re-evaluation. The amendment follows complaints of large-scale errors in the results announced for the last semester exams.
Meanwhile, students in BU’s B.Ed. colleges will have to wait for at least three more days to apply for re-evaluation. The university has announced the results for 26 B.Ed. (category one) colleges, but is yet to announce the results of 16 colleges which were granted permission on conditional basis to conduct the exam. “Seven of these 16 colleges are yet to submit their IA marks,” Registrar (Evaluation) R.K. Somashekhar said. He added that according to the rules, all re-evaluation had to be done at one time.
Disaffiliation
The VC said that courses in 11 colleges had been disaffiliated for 2013-14 based on the re-inspection report of the K.M. Hanumantharayappa committee.
