Hon'ble Shri Bhagat Singh Koshyari,

Hon'ble Shri Suhas Pednekar,

This email is regarding the decision by autonomous colleges in Mumbai to conduct exams offline and also regarding the concerns of the students with respect to the offline exams for Undergraduate and other courses.

On 17 March 2022, a protest was set up in Azad Maidan where students were visibly upset about the decision of the autonomous colleges. 

Mumbai University had said that traditional courses will be taken in the online mode. However, Autonomous Colleges were allowed to continue with offline exams if they wanted.

In a circular dated 11 March 2022, Honourable Joint Director - Higher Education requested these autonomous colleges to conduct their exams in the online mode.

These autonomous colleges, however, have not paid attention to our requests and have dismissed our requests. However, autonomous colleges such as St. Xavier’s, Sophia, Mithibai and several other colleges are proceeding with offline exams. This creates some concerns for students like us:

1.       It has been over 2 years of online exams and students have been educated via online platforms. Students in their third and final year are being asked to come back to Mumbai and prepare for offline exams with extremely short notice. Not only is this jeopardising the student’s health by travelling from their home state and even locally via local trains, buses, etc, but it is also creating problems for students who are not able to find accommodations.

2.       Students from colleges who are still opting for the online mode of examination have an unfair advantage over students who are being forced to go offline and write their exams. Any student that is being evaluated in the online mode will score higher than the students appearing offline since the online examinations have been set by the teachers for the online mode. These exams are much easier than the traditional pen and paper exam. This disadvantage reduces our chances of getting better scores and reduces our possibility of securing better colleges for further education or better jobs.

3.       Nascent data is showing the possibility of a return of Covid-19 with a highly transmissible variant. We have seen trends in Israel and China, Italy and the UK in the past few days. This has obviously worried the students and their parents who don’t want to send their children to packed examination halls. In the case of outstation students who are unable to find accommodations, parents are worried about sending their children to hotels.

Thus, we humbly request you to take action and ensure that these colleges take their exams online at least for the outgoing batches as now we have to worry about traveling, covid affecting our health (both mentally and physically), accommodations and so on. As though this is not enough, we have the existent pressure to study for these exams and these unnecessary pressures should not be placed on the heads of the students.

We hope that you can look into this and take the necessary steps to ensure that students can be assessed fairly, safely and without additional stress.

Regards,

 

820 students (as of 24 March 2022)