The B.Ed. (Bachelor of Education) and LLB (Bachelor of Law) entrance examinations of the University of Delhi (DU) have come under condemnation as allegations of blatant cheating and maladministration of the examinations have been flagged.

The invigilators of the LLB examination, held on the 18th of June 2018, were allegedly lax in their invigilation, thereby giving liberty to the candidates to cheat. On the other hand, candidates who had appeared for the entrance exam for B. Ed on the same date claimed that the servers at the Ojas Institute of Management, the exam center in Rohini, had crashed.

As told by a DU graduate Ishan Patel, while the exam was slated to begin at 4 p.m. and end by 6 p.m., most candidates did not submit their papers until 8 p.m. This was seen as unfair to the candidates who had appeared for the same examination from other centers and had thus received relatively lesser time. However, these allegations were dismissed by an official at the institute who asserted, “There was no such problem at our end. It was a minor issue which was later resolved.”

Regarding these claims of mismanagement, complaints have been made to the DU administration by the General Secretary of the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) Mahamedhaa Nagar.

In conversation with DU Beat, Mahamedhaa remarked, “I know of many candidates whose relatives were owners or shareholders of the institutes where the entrances were held. This offered favorable circumstances for candidates to indulge in illicit activities. I have also been informed of cases wherein the servers had stopped working and the candidates received only 45 minutes to write their papers. And when these students complained, they were told Tu Itna Intelligent Hota Toh 45 Minutes Mein Hi Kar Leta. (If you were intelligent enough, then you would have been able to complete the paper within 45 minutes itself.”

In the phone call conversation, Nagar added, “I do acknowledge that even when entrances are conducted in the university’s colleges, certain candidates manage to get the papers leaked. But then, those have been rare cases wherein the miscreants needed enormous resources and a lot of contacts. But now, when entrance exam centers are allotted to private institutes, the candidates are able to ‘buy’ the invigilators in just INR 10,000.”

Complaints of maladministration of the examination were also reported from the Babu Banarsi Das Institute of Technology in Ghaziabad. Ankit, a former student of Science at DU, had reached the center early to avoid any mishaps. However, the exam was delayed by almost an hour.

Expressing concern regarding the state of affairs, Midrash Mathew, the National Spokesperson of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), told the DU Beat correspondent, “A lot of things have gone wrong with the examination system. Instead of holding these entrances in private institutes, it would have been better had they been held in the colleges within the University. That would have provided a more conducive environment for the conduction of exams.”

To unearth how the DU administration was responding to these criticisms, the DU Beat correspondent called up the office of the Deputy Proctor of DU, situated opposite to the Department of Botany in North Campus. However, the countless calls and the innumerable emails went unanswered. Nevertheless, sources have noted a senior official working in the administrative quarters of DU as saying, “We have systems in place that would allow students to get clarity on their exams and we are further improving the systems.”

Notwithstanding the ambiguity of this statement, justice needs to be served to candidates whose futures have been trivialised by the incautious comportment of invigilators and examination centers of the LLB and B. Ed entrance examinations this year.

Feature Image Credits: The Indian Express
Vaibhavi Sharma Pathak
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