University students surprised by ‘out of syllabus’ questions

Final year students of the computer engineering stream were in for a rude shock on the first day of their semester 7 examination on Monday. They say that the question paper of the subject — Digital Signal and Image Processing (DSIP) — had some questions which were not in their syllabus, and the paper pattern also differed from the regular pattern which they had prepared for.

On Tuesday, students took to circulating an SMS among other final year computer engineering students about the errors in the paper, in an attempt to garner support from everyone who had appeared for this paper, to demand a re-exam. A student said, “There were hardly any theory-based questions and even those that were there were twisted. Usually, the DSIP paper is a blend of theoretical questions and numericals, but the papers on Monday gave more weightage to numericals and confused us.”

After the first paper itself turned out to be unexpected, students are now panicking. According to information provided by students, some colleges are even planning to write to the university in this regard, requesting a re-examination.   

However, Subhash Deo, director of examinations, University of Mumbai, denied all the students’ claims and said, “Only one college called us with a query on Monday. Those were normal typographical errors which were corrected. As soon as we got the complaint, the chairman was asked to verify it. But after verification, the paper was declared to be neither out of syllabus nor out of pattern. However, we will check once again.”