Frequent postponement of examinations on OU campus is hitting hard on students who plan their academic and competitive exam preparation schedule in advance. The administration has no idea or a plan to deal with repeated demands for postponement of examinations.
The latest in the series of postponed exams on “request” of students was the Ph.D. course work examinations scheduled for January 28 and 31. A public meeting organised by a student organisation on the same day and students' preparing for competitive exams were cited as reasons, without a realisation of the hardship this would cause hundreds of other students who were prepared to write the exam.
The semester exams have been postponed innumerable times in the last two years as some students refused to write it citing reasons such as Telangana agitation, clash with competitive examinations, lack of time for preparation and unfavourable atmosphere. “The more the administration succumbs, the more students will pressurise,” agrees a senior teacher. “The image of the university is at stake and more so when we have got the status of University with Potential for Excellence.”
If exams have been postponed eight times in the last two years, one can gauge the pressure under which the administration works. Foreign students quite literally had to fight with the administration to write the exams as they faced problems like visa expiry and loss of jobs back home. So intense was the pressure that OU conducted exams separately for them in a college outside the campus.
In fact, when the Telangana agitation was at its peak, the administration came up with the idea to decentralise the exams asking private colleges to conduct exams at their colleges. It also toyed with the idea of choosing centres outside campus to escape frequent postponements but no concrete steps have emerged from the idea so far.
But, records prove that if the University goes ahead with the exams despite boycott threats, students will back in the examination hall after one or two days. Last year, when the semester exams were boycotted on campus, they were still held outside the premise. The pressure tactic worked as students had to carry all those backlogs to the next semester.
OU Vice-Chancellor S. Satyanarayana agreed that frequent postponements will hit the university's image. “We went ahead with the semester exams recently despite protests and it paid off. I will be tough with the exam schedule henceforth.”
