BENGALURU: Following protests from various student representatives, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) has decided to postpone exams for all even semesters that were scheduled to begin next week.
In a note, the varsity said that final year BE exams, scheduled to start from June 5, will now begin on June 12. All other semester exams will commence on June 23. The exam timetable will be announced on June 3. This came after a press meet with Dr Karisiddappa, Vice-chancellor of VTU. Since VTU delayed the release of odd semester results further delaying revaluation, students from various colleges staged protests across the state on Tuesday and Wednesday.
They had argued that the university had put students in a fix as they would be forced to pay for next semester exams even without knowing the results of revaluation.
Karisiddappa attributed the delay in processing results to the introduction of a new system to avoid outsourcing. This resulted in a number of technical glitches and left the varsity with a shortage of manpower.
While evaluation of scripts usually begins a week following the exam and results are announced two weeks later, this time, scanning of answer scripts began only a week after exams. This led to a delay in evaluating odd semester answer scripts.
He said that previously, there were complaints that answer sheets went missing at the time of evaluation or scanning. To address this issue, each sheet was bar-coded this time. Changing to the new system meant that details of 24 lakh students had to be imported to their software from NIC. In the process, Karisiddappa said, details of candidates who either changed streams or colleges was not copied by the system.