MU results mess: 3.2L scripts unchecked

With just a few hours left for the July 31 deadline set by the Chancellor and Maharashtra Governor C Vidyasagar Rao to declare results, it was yet another disappointing day at the University of Mumbai as 3,25,729 answer scripts were yet to be evaluated, including 2,64,088 commerce papers alone, until Sunday evening. Only 23,674 papers could be evaluated on Sunday as only 928 faculty members of the 5,000-plus teachers turned up for assessment.

With the evaluation work losing pace at a time when it was expected to be fast-tracked, there is a fear that even those results that were expected to come in by July 31 might not be ready.

"328 results are yet to be declared as on Sunday. We are hoping to declare 100 more by the end of Monday," MA Khan, Registrar, University of Mumbai, said.

"Most results from the commerce faculty would be pending as assessment work for the stream is still on. Those should be declared in the next 3-5 days as the work would be over," he added.

While MU Vice Chancellor Sanjay Deshmukh has stated that the university will declare the remaining results in the first week of August, students are now losing patience. "It is really unfair to subject students to this kind of torture. The university has failed to stick to even an extended deadline and it's a real tragedy for all the students who are pinning their hopes on the results for jobs and higher education," a final year BA student said.

Major systemic failure proved to be a big hurdle in speeding up the evaluation process at the university in the last few hours. Less than a day before the July 31 deadline to declare the results, two additional centres -- one at Shivaji University, Kolhapur and another at Aurangabad University could not help in the evaluation process in any way as the teachers of these universities could not be tagged into the system despite several requests made to the service provider.

"We requested the company to tag teachers from these universities but despite several requests, they could not be tagged and thus could not start the evaluation. It was sad to know that a large number of teachers left without evaluating a single paper due to the technical fault of the agency," said a university official.

Systemic delays and glitches led to the failure of all the last minute measures taken by the university – including giving non instructional days to its own teachers and opening centres for evaluation in other universities. While there were several complaints of the server being slow and errors cropping up in the papers assigned in the last one week, the situation became worse as additional teachers from across the state could not be roped in within the time limit. While the university has already issued a memo to the agency recently, there seems to be no improvement in the system.

Officials from MeritTrac, the IT firm roped in for the on-screen assessment of answer sheets, did not respond to any of the queries sent by DNA, despite several attempts to get a response over the last three days.