Unavailability of teachers delaying online assessment, says university

Mumbai University (MU) has blamed the unavailability of teachers for the delay in the online assessment of answer sheets. As some of the teachers are on vacation, the varsity requests all the teachers to curtail their holidays and help speed up this process for the benefit of the students.

For the first time, MU introduced this On-Screen Marking (OSM) of answer sheets on April 28. According to this process, each paper of every answer sheet has to be manually scanned, displayed on the computer screen following which the examiners will check the papers on the computer and upload the results on a common digital platform.

Around 9,500 teachers were trained for this process but now the university claims that the teachers are not available for the assessment. MA Khan, registrar of MU, told the Free Press Journal, “Some of the teachers are on vacation therefore the process is delayed. We request all the teachers to curtail their holidays, give first preference to this process and consider the interests of the students.”

The process was initiated to declare the results soon but till date the university is not sure about when it will be able to declare the results. “Unless we have sufficient teachers to check the papers online we cannot say when the results can be declared,” Khan said.

The work of scanning and uploading papers of 90% of the examinations is completed. But the officers of the university revealed that this process is tedious and takes time. A senior official from the MU said, “This process is being carried out for the first time so it is taking time to scan the answer sheets and keep track. Also, each scan process has a page limit of 42. So, if any paper is missed or has additional pages the machine detects it. Therefore, even if students have filled only two pages of the entire answer sheet consisting of 42 pages, we have to scan all