The Delhi High Court on Friday passed a slew of directions relating to online Open Book Examination (OBE), which will be conducted by the Delhi University for final year undergraduate courses from August 10, to ensure fair opportunity for students keeping in view the technical problems.
The court said it is mindful that enormous preparations have been undertaken by students for giving the online OBE and now it is concerned about the manner in which the process can be further streamlined.
Justice Prathiba M Singh said it has not gone into the legal arguments raised by petitioner students as to how the online OBE is arbitrary and discriminatory in nature owing to the directions passed by the division bench permitting DU to proceed with the online OBE.
The court passed the verdict on a plea by Anupam and others challenging the university’s decision to hold online OBE, as per the UGC guidelines, for final year undergraduate courses which will be in long-form exams.
DU is scheduled to hold the exams from August 10-31 and the students who will be left out of online OBE will be given an opportunity to appear in physical examinations, to be held sometime in September.
The court passed various directions to streamline the process, noting that there are various technological challenges and the evaluation is of 70-100 marks for each paper.
It directed that the question papers shall be made accessible for students on the university website and be sent on their email IDs.
It said regular students and those under the persons with disability (PWD) category be given three hours and five hours respectively to answer the question papers and one additional hour for scanning the answer sheets and uploading or emailing them.
The university was directed to send an auto-generated email informing the students that their answer sheets have been received.
“The central email id for uploading of answer sheets, that is, obescript@exam.du.ac.in, shall be publicised adequately,” Justice Singh said in the 45-page judgment.
Common Service Centres (CSC) Academy, which runs the CSCs set up to provide services to students who do not have infrastructure to give OBE, shall notify all its centres the schedule of the exams by the end of the day so that they can provide assistance to students to the best extent possible, it said.
