NEW DELHI: The Jawaharlal Nehru University administration on Friday decided to hold the computer-based entrance examination for the next academic year “keeping in view the difficulties of students to write the examination in December”, contrary to its students’ union stance.
The decision was taken at the 148th Academic Council meeting held on Friday, to which the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) was not invited.
The examination, scheduled to be held in May 2019, will be conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) — an autonomous organisation, which conducts entrance examination for admission/fellowship in the higher educational institutions.
“To make the entrance examinations accessible to the applicants even from remote areas, the number of examination centres will be doubled as compared to previous years. Mock test centres will also be introduced so that the prospective applicants can practice and become familiar with the computer-based entrance examinations well before the scheduled dates of the examinations,” registrar Pramod Kumar said in a statement.
Apart from various schools, centres and special centres extending their cooperation by submitting multiple choice-based question papers, a few of them and the School of Arts and Aesthetics declined, according to the statement issued by the registrar.
JNUSU president N Sai Balaji said, “The administration has been changing the morality of the online examination. The original recommendations of the committee, in which two professors were accused of massive plagiarism, recommended a third-party private vendor for online entrance examination. Nowhere does it recommend to be done by the National Testing Agency.”
Rap for a few centres
The Academic Council took note of non-compliance by a few Centres and School of Arts and Aesthetics as they declined to set the question papers and recommended disciplinary action