Nagpur University Sinks To New Low, Cancels Exam Midway

Nagpur: Probably for the first time, the Nagpur University (NU) was forced to cancel the Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) fourth-semester examination after it commenced on Thursday morning due to wrong question paper that led to uproar across exam centres. Within an hour, NU exam section announced re-exam on June 10. Serving and retired exam section officials said there is no previous instance when a running exam had to be called off in this manner.The chaos began after students appearing for BCom 4th semester examination in Fundamentals of Insurance were instead provided a question paper titled accordingly but containing questions from Fundamentals of Banking, a third-semester subject. Hundreds of students and several exam centres confronted officials over the goof-up.Top exam officials admitted the blunder but blamed the paper setter for skipping the ‘title' on question paper sets. "The setter mentioned the paper title on first question paper set but forgot to do so for the rest of the lot. Hence, same title was repeated on all sets," they said adding around 950 students out of over 10,000 BCom students got wrong question paper.Students alleged that after raising the issue, many of them were asked to leave the examination centres and return home instead of continuing with the exam. In some cases, the invigilators allegedly forced students to attempt the paper despite the anomaly.The incident took place in the morning shift starting at 9.30am. NU exam section realised the error after passage of an hour.An examinee at one of the centres said, "Invigilators told us that 160 students got the correct question paper. Around 80 of us got the banking-related question paper though the subject title was proper on it. We tallied all the questions and found none of them were in our syllabus and books. We were asked to submit a written application at the exam centre and go home."The student said only 40 to 50 from this exam centre were asked to go while the rest of the affected students were held back in exam halls. "They were asked to solve the same question paper," a student said.A parent said the invigilators forced the students to keep writing without taking their grievances into account. "This caused a lot of mental trauma. This is an exam season and our kids have to study too. But they were forced to go through a lot of trouble. This will have an impact on their overall performance," the parent said.Commerce faculty members slammed the NU exam section and the Board of Studies for the muddle. "The root cause is frequent changes in syllabus. Sometimes the changes skip our attention too as BoS never bothers to inform us. The paper setting too gets affected due to such changes. Students of fourth-semester were taught at 6am on the day of the exam as syllabus was changed after summer exams started," said a principal.