NEHUSU demands cancellation of final examination

Syllad | The Rising MeghalayaJuly 29, 2020

The North Eastern Hill University Students’ Union (NEHUSU) has demanded cancellation of final examination and instead devise an alternative method to resolve the issue in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a memorandum submitted to the NEHU Vice Chancellor, Prof SK Srivastava on Wednesday, president of the students’ union, Yshua Lyngdoh said, “(We) categorically demands cancellation of final examination and demands assessment of students based on past performance, for which a reasonable formula can be worked out.”

Lyngdoh said students as stakeholders cannot be made surrogate to unilateral UGC diktats to which most of the student bodies of the country do not agree with.

“The students’ community asks you for a student friendly decision at this moment and not a high handed bureaucratic decision that panders only to the bosses of the UGC,” he said in the letter.  

Also reminding that UGC recommendation is only regulatory and advisory and not mandatory, the NEHUSU president said, “Considering the ground reality and the crisis of students, NEHU will be well within its own autonomy to decide as per its Act, even if it is different from the UGC.”

The letter further said that students have conclusively experienced the incomplete learning of the syllabus and inadequacy of online classes that could not even be attended properly due to existing digital divide.

“In such a situation, any insistence of a final examination is like adding salt to the injury of the students in the most insensitive and irresponsible manner that even a pandemic fails to correct. A final examination, then, is just one of the many ways, which seemingly does not fit into the health crisis created by pandemic. Indeed the health crisis opens up new ways of ensuring students passage through the last stage of a degree or even of an end of semester assessment,” it said.

The NEHUSU suggested for an assessment based on averages drawn out of past performances instead of farcical online examination. It said offline physical examination through presence is out of question, any other means or methods are fraught with some problems of transparency and regulation.