Jadavpur University changes exam rule to appease TMC students

In a recent development the Executive Council (EC) of Jadavpur University has decided to change the rules for examination in its engineering faculty and allowed the students to move from one semester to the next without clearing the previous one.

But what is bizarre about the decision is that the EC in its resolution has mentioned that the decision was influenced by the pressure given by the Trinamool Congress led students union.

It mentioned that after receiving the deputation from the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad, the EC resolved that a student's movement from one semester to the next one would be unrelated to his examination result.

In other words, an engineering student who has not cleared his first semester would be allowed to continue with his studies in second semester and so on. The Jadavpur University Teachers' Association (JUTA) is opposed to this decision and a delegation of JUTA today met the vice chancellor to record their protest with the authority.

Prof. Partha Biswas is a senior academic in the engineering faculty and was a member of the Executive Council till two months back. He explains that the earlier rule was that the students had to clear at least 50% of the papers of a semester to move into the next.

After this resolution that won't be required as that has been made unrelated to the movement from one semester to another. But he points out that the new system has both positive and negative sides. Now the students might be burdened with a huge load of clearing a number of papers at one go in the final semester. " But what is strange about this is that the university authority did not bother to discuss the proposal with the stakeholders (namely the students and the teachers bodies) before taking this decision," comments Prof. Biwa.

Jadavpur University has a number of students unions including SFI and Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad. Also, there are a number of popular student bodies like Arts Faculty Students Union (AFSU), Forum for Arts Students (FAS), and Forum for Engineering and Technology Students Union (FETSU)etc.While the other student bodies are there for years, the Trinamool students union is relatively new, they only started working there from October last. Prof. Biswas says, "The student unions often submit demands to the university authority on various issues and that are considered with due importance. But never in the past the university authority issued notice mentioning one particular student body as a root cause of a particular decision."