JNTUH may decide to do without DoP

The JNTU Hyderabad is likely to terminate the services of postal department that transports answer sheets from its affiliated colleges to the university exam branch in view of the recent answer sheet scam.

A committee constituted by the University after the scam was exposed with the arrest of a few persons including students, non-teaching staff and an employee of the postal department has met and discussed ways to plug the loopholes in the system.

One of the views expressed by the committee members was to discontinue the services of the postal department, which was entrusted with the responsibility of bringing the answer sheets from affiliated colleges to the university exam branch.

Another suggestion was to make the packaging of answer sheets tamper-proof and also use GPS services to monitor the movement of the vehicles that transport the answer sheets.

“We were surprised to see that the accused were able to identify even the decoded answer sheets. New measures for coding and decoding the answer sheets will also be looked into,” an official said.

The university would also keep a watch on students who have many backlogs and clear them suddenly. Answer papers of such students would be internally valued again to see if there was something fishy.

Interestingly, students resorting to manipulations and malpractices were those who were repeatedly failing in the exams. The police arrested 13 people last month while they were transporting tampered answer sheets.

Money collected

The accused were allegedly collecting Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 15,000 from some failed students to provide their original answer sheets and replace the same after re-writing the answers before depositing it in the JNTU exam branch. These answer sheets belonged to students from various colleges in and around the city.

A senior official of the University ruled out manipulation once the answer sheets reached the University.

The exam branch was closely monitored with surveillance cameras and it was difficult for manipulation there.

He said students should not worry about manipulators getting grabbing easy marks paying money.

“Out of the 4.6 lakh students in the University, only a few were resorting to such practices and they will be caught at some point or the other,” he said.