On the second day of mock tests for the Open Book Examinations (OBE) on Sunday, students at Delhi University continued to face various technical hurdles and called for the scrapping of the planned examinations.
Amreen Kholi, a third-year BA (English literature) student from Punjab, faced difficulties downloading as well as uploading the question paper on the first and second days of the mock test. She believed there was no way the university would be able to pull off the final exams.
Manish Kumar, a final-year BA student at Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College, said: “The screen kept displaying some ‘gateway error’.” He was among the few to have logged on to the portal half-an-hour in advance. After multiple attempts he was able to download the question paper, but many of his classmates were unable to download it.
“This is when not everyone even attended the exam,” he pointed out. “I don’t even have any book... on top of that, I don’t know if I should study for this or prepare for entrance exams,” he added.
Many students also took to social media to raise their complaints. Final year postgraduate student Shivam Sati from Uttrakhand expressed anxiety over his inability to study as there was no electricity at his house for the last two days and he said that the inverter would soon go out. “Yesterday’s horror show of mock tests has clearly shown that online exams won’t work. Why is DU VC so adamant?” he tweeted.
“This was the second day of the mock test and feedback continues to be quite painful and sad,” teacher’s group Academics for Action and Development said in a statement, adding that it had raised concerns about website crashes, missing question papers and other issues, but no improvement seems to have been made.
The group also said that students approaching common service centres were told that there was no information to provide facilities for OBE. The group also reiterated its demand to scrap the examinations.
In a related development, the DU Teacher’s Association president Rajib Ray, speaking on the university’s recent decision to spend ₹2 lakh as reimbursement towards visually impaired students, said it would be too late and too less to adequately compensate students.
