Day 2: Delhi University exams again fail to score much

NEW DELHI: Delhi University’s open book exams for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students continued to face problems on the second day on Tuesday, with students complaining of the exam portal crashing around 3pm and impeding the process of uploading answer sheets. DU characterised it not as a crash, but a “spike in traffic”.
“After hearing others saying the exam portal was not accepting answer sheets, I check it myself to find an ‘error’ response,” said history student Jaishree Kumar of Ramjas College.“After 20 minutes of fiddling with the website, I sent my answers to the email address provided by DU.”
A Hindu College political science honours student was both happy and unhappy on Tuesday. He received his question paper link at 10.50am, much before the scheduled time of 11.30am, so was able to complete his test by 2:30 pm. “However, submission of the answer sheet was a problem,” he said. “With our college HoD’s help, we mailed the answer sheets to DU. But there was no confirmation of receipt for many of us.”
Vinay Gupta, dean of exams, claimed to TOI, “We received no reports of a crash.” The computer centre head, Sanjeev Singh, similarly maintained there was “only a spike in traffic for 4-5 minutes and this was resolved quickly”. But a student, who answered his paper from Jalore in Rajasthan, grumbled, “When the university had three months to prepare for OBE, shouldn’t it have developed a portal capable of managing high traffic?”
Kumar Ashutosh, nodal officer at College of Vocational Studies, started receiving hundreds of answer sheets on email after 3pm. He said the portal glitch was possibly due to “the high traffic with core exams in courses like BCom, economics and history slated on the day”. Around 32,000 students participated in the exam on Tuesday.
Other nodal officers also reported receiving answer scripts mailed by the examinees. One of them said, “This goes against the ethos of examination and is a violation of exam secrecy. Today, more students sent mails to the nodal officers than yesterday. When they didn’t get a confirmation from the university official email account for answer sheets, they panicked and began mailing them to us.”
While a DU official conceded that high traffic delayed the automatic confirmation mails, members of DUTA and Indian National Teachers Congress apprised the institutional authorities about the anxiety of the students. Pankaj Garg, mathematic professor and INTEC member, said, “The students sent the answers multiple times to college mail IDs to make sure they were received by the university. This increases chances of duplicity. Students should get a quick response on the receipt of their answer sheets.”
There was also alarm at DU asking for names of students alongside their roll number on the answer scripts. DUTA treasurer Abha Dev Habib claimed this was “the first time in DU’s history that students are being asked to inscribe their names and they are fearing victimisation”. A DU official assured students that “secrecy will be maintained” and the names were required “only to verify the answer sheet’s authenticity”.