A thriving exam marks racket involving some faculty members and officials has come to light in the premier Anna University in Chennai.
The racket has helped children of influential parents who failed in semester examinations to pass with flying colours in two of the university’s four renowned campuses — the College of Engineering in Guindy (CEG) and the Madras Institute of Technology (MIT) in Chromepet.
Rumours about the shocking academic malpractice that flourished through pseudo revaluation exercises were widely doing the rounds for the past three years. However, for the first time, evidence has emerged in black and white.
A couple of junior faculty members have over the past month admitted that they revalued the answer papers of some failed students and gave them pass marks on the instructions of an university Examination Department official. The official has since been moved out, but not as punishment.
One of the assistant professors in the Dept of Computer Technology at the MIT campus has addressed his letter, in the form of a confession, to the Chief Minister’s Cell. For some strange reason, the other assistant professor at the Ramanujan Computing Centre in CEG has addressed his letter to an official of a quasi-government body who is well-versed with the state of affairs.
Naming a university official who abused his position in the Examination Department, the MIT assistant professor has said that the former “gave me the papers and asked me to give pass mark for some of the papers. I have been given the subjects from their first semester and other semesters.”
Alarmingly, in April, the official had given him answer papers of subjects which have nothing do with the evaluator’s expertise. The assistant professor, whose specialisation is in computers, has said he was asked to evaluate among others Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics papers and “many more subjects which I do not remember.”
Similarly, the faculty member at the CEG has said he gave pass marks to students in six subjects during Nov-Dec 2009 and April-May 2010. “In future, I cannot do this kind of mistakes where it affects the brand of my university (sic),” he said in the letter.
On March 5, 2011, Express had published a report ‘Revaluation route helps influential students excel’ highlighting how senior professors had rued that VVIP kids who were irregular to classes mysteriously passed with flying colours. Even HoDs were unaware of how the weakest students cleared their examinations.