In what is being widely seen as a body blow to the credibility of the choice-based credit-and-semester system for degree courses in the University of Kerala, the results of the first-semester BA and B.Sc. examinations have been unduly delayed.
Even the fact that the second-semester examinations are scheduled from Thursday does not appear to have infused a sense of urgency in the university.
The first-semester examinations got over last December, and under the regulations, the results should have been published within 45 days. After many administrative back flips, the university published the results of the B.Com. examinations in May.
Top university officials told The Hindu that the university was “reeling under an acute personnel shortage.” This, reportedly, is the main reason for the delay.
“It is also a fact that the number of students writing the BA examinations is very large,” an official said. The results will be out shortly, he added.
The shortage of personnel has not been an overnight occurrence or an unexpected development. Moreover, the delay now appears to pale before another problem which looms large in front of the university: an acute shortage of teachers for evaluating the answer sheets of the second-semester examinations.
A top official associated with the examination processes said the problem was acute in the case of the English papers. “We have estimated that more than 30,000 papers will be there to be evaluated. So far, we only have the names of nearly 200 teachers for evaluation duty. This means that one teacher will have to go through more than 1,000 answer papers. If the university walked the centralised valuation camp route, it will take more than two months of camps to finish the grading of all these answer sheets,” the official said.
The main factor which crippled the camps of the first semester was a dire shortage of teachers. The camp in Alappuzha was short of 53 teachers — a gap which the university found unbridgeable. This time too, a repeat show is likely. The university has called a meeting of a sub-committee of college principals for Tuesday.
The university has warned colleges of dire consequences if they did not send an adequate number of teachers to the valuation camps. Given the university's history of taking disciplinary action against recalcitrant teachers, the threat is unlikely to galvanise colleges into action.
This time round, the university may have no option but to initiate drastic action — including shutting down colleges for a few days to allow more teachers to come to camps — if it wishes to redeem the credibility of the semester system.
