A day into the end-semester exam, some engineering students have raised the issue of having difficulty in posting the answer scripts.
Students have to scan their answer sheets after the exam and then have to send the answer sheets either by courier or post to the respective colleges and quite a few of them find the task difficult.
“Even though lockdown has been lifted, most of the post offices are operating only up to 12.30 p.m. Post offices that are open till 3.30 p.m., require us to get tokens. For this, we need to wait in the queue from noon itself,” said a student.
A third year ECE student of a city college said she encountered difficulty while scanning the answer sheets. “The time taken for scanning depends on the mobile application or the device. While scanning, I learnt that the application I used allows a maximum of only 25 pages. Since I had written a few more pages I had to scan the last pages separately and merge the two documents. This is time consuming,” she said. The long queue of students outside the post office was also a worry, she added.
Another student said he chose to courier the answer script though it was an expensive option. He said he was afraid of the lack of physical distancing norms in a public place. “It is not easy to courier the answer scripts. Some of my friends are in rural areas and they find it difficult to post the answer scripts since there is no courier office in their villages. It would be nice if we get some acknowledgement from the college after getting a soft copy of our answer scripts,” said another student.
Professors say the idea of asking students to mail the answer scripts is to ensure that the students send only the answer scripts they had scanned. Also, colleges do not have the facility to scan all the answer sheets they receive.
“It is not as if they are going to be penalised if the answer scripts land later. The aim is to ensure that all students comply with the rules. This is an open book exam pattern with students being given sufficient time to write it. We are not going to fail them just because their answer sheets arrived late,” said a government college principal.
