Mumbai University Results 2017 Likely to be Announced Today

The Mumbai University Results 2017 have been delayed by more than 2 months now. Generally, the results of MU are announced in the month of May or June however this time they are expected to be out today i.e. July 31st 2017, however only time will tell if students get a breather or not. Change is good, but this definitely doesn’t hold true in case of Mumbai University’s change from manual correction of examination answer sheets, to the online assessment and checking of the same.

Earlier this year, Mumbai University took the decision to change the mode of assessment and checking of answer sheets to online or digital as opposed to the traditional pen and paper system. This seems like a very big step and at first was thought of as a remarkable change, until both the students and the teachers started to suffer.

The teachers who are supposed to assess the answer sheets online are suffering due to technical glitches and faulty management of the online assessment system and in turn the students are the ones who are paying the price for this in terms of delayed results due to which they can’t appear in the counseling for admissions to their next course.

Out of the total 477 examinations conducted, the results of 427 have been delayed beyond 45 days with some delayed even by up to 60 days. MU has already crossed the 45-day deadline in declaring the results but now the deadline issued of declaration of results by July 31 by State Education Minister Vinod Tawde is also around the corner and seems highly unlikely. Protests are being held by students and teachers alike against Mr. Sanjay Deshmukh, VC – Mumbai University. The delay in results of MU 2017 has shaken both the houses demanding Sanjay Deshmukh’s removal and Vinod Tawde’s resignation.

Mumbai University had set up 142 assessment centres and they had invited other Universities too who have at least 50 computers in their lab to register as micro centres.

The new system required the answer sheets to be scanned and put up on a software which will display the answer sheet on the assessing teacher’s screen and he/she will be able to mark it and input the marks of the student in the common system. More than 22 lakh answer sheets were expected to be scanned and put into the system starting second week of May. The assessment started in the first week of June.

Considering the reality that more than 22 lakh answer sheets were to be scanned using 50 scan machines and 250 employees to scan a 1.50 lakh answer sheets per day, the result had to get delayed especially for streams like B.Sc., B.Com, B.A., etc which have a large number of students enrolled.

The inordinate delay is due to many reasons. Firstly, the agency that would set up the online assessment system was not finalized until the examinations got over, tenders sure were invited however the finalization and announcement wasn’t done until the last week of April.

Once the system was set up, a one day training session was held for the teachers. A new system altogether was introduced but only 1 day of training was held, there was no clarity on the procedure and no instruction manual or any sort of instructions were given to the teachers.

A day-long session of teachers’ training was scheduled somewhere between April 24 to 28 and was held in 50 different centers across all seven districts under the jurisdiction of MU, however there were many teachers who weren’t called in for the training amongst these were many senior teachers as well and even those teachers who aren’t tech savvy, also MU didn’t hold any further training sessions rather decided that rest of the training will be done on the go i.e. on the job itself while working with the new system.

When the system started working, many examiners who were supposed to check English scripts got the scripts answered in Marathi, examiners for the subject English got answer sheets for some other subject and so on. Many examiners were unable to download answer sheets due to low internet speed, they were required to evaluate answer sheets for 3 papers but some examiners have only got the requisite codes for one.

There are few problems with the software as well such as the software only allows to save and close the paper that is being assessed and so in the event of power failure, the work done is lost and the teachers have to re-open it all over again and assess it again not only a time consuming process but also double work.

In the earlier manual system of answer sheets assessment, teachers used to assess around 30 Answer sheets in a day, however with the online assessment system, they could initially check 8-9 answer sheets as they took time to get accustomed to this transition.

In all this chaos, the ones suffering the most are the students, because even when they’ve cleared the written exams they can’t appear in the counseling process unless their Mumbai University 2017 results are declared. However, MU has given Provisional Mark Sheets based on the results of first five semesters to these students.

And the worst part is that MU didn’t think all this through and wasted not only time and money but also played with the future of lakhs of students studying in MU. This effort could’ve been a remarkable transition however it failed miserably owing to lack of proper planning and mismanagement.