2020 most challenging year for Bamu

Aurangabad, Dec 30:

The Novel coronavirus has affected every field across the world and education was no exception to it.

The State Government had announced in May end that the final semester examinations would be cancelled.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) asked all the States to hold examinations of final semester students of undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the country. Subsequently, the Government directed the universities of the State, including Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University (Bamu) for the final semester examinations.

There were many challenges before BAMU, including examinations and declaring results.

Talking to this newspaper, vice-chancellor Dr Pramod Yeole said that for the first time in the history of university online examinations were conducted to such a large number of students.

“Maintaining all measures of COVID was not an easy task during the examinations.

It was challenging for us as it was not done within jurisdictions of the university before. However, there was a problem of electricity and Internet connectivity in rural and remote areas.

So, we also gave an option of offline examinations. Around 3.50 lakh students took the examinations in Aurangabad, Jalna, Beed and Osmanabad districts in October.

All students, teachers, officers and employees of the colleges and universities followed measures of COVID in the whole process,” he asserted.

VC Dr Yeole said that not a single student was deprived of examinations within the university’s jurisdiction.

“We had planned to declare the results in eight to ten days. However, due to some technical, it did not happen. Teachers and principals of the colleges helped us in declaring the result after around one month,” he said.

When asked about the result''s errors, the vice-chancellor said that around 19,000 candidates appeared thrice to some papers online and offline modes.

“How one will assess the answer book in such a situation. A team was made to declare the result of the result. More than 10,000 cases were solved so far,” he said. The admission process for M Phil was completed smoothly and successfully.

“The university not just conducted all the examinations process but also establishment two COVID tests laboratory—one in city campus and another at Osmanabad sub-centre. The whole fund was raised from corporate social responsibility. The district administration supported it. More than 50,000 samples were tested in the laboratories,” he added.