By Kainat Sarfaraz:
“Coming to Delhi, all the way from Kolkata, turned out to be a waste”, says 18-year-old Junaid Siddique. He was one of the several students, who had appeared for the B Tech entrance test in Jamia Millia Islamia on June 13. However, a fresh entrance test will now take place on June 27.
Reason? It was found out that the question papers were leaked.
According to reports, some of the teachers in the university had received emails containing the leaked entrance test papers of BTech and Bachelor of Dental Sciences (BDS), which had not taken place by then. This led to the cancellation of the Btech entrance test and the BDS test was said to have been postponed due to ‘unavoidable circumstances’.
Many have expressed their displeasure over outsourcing the entrance exam procedures to a private company named Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC), which is a subsidiary of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
A senior professor of the University had also expressed his dissent in a Facebook post which has now been removed. The post mentioned that “The University neither invited tenders for outsourcing the work related to entrance exams and admissions nor took permission from the university’s statutory bodies before signing the contract with CMC. The question is what was the need of using an outside agency to handle the admission process this year that too without competitive bidding?”
According to reports, the BTech department had received 39,654 applications this year while the BDS had invited 6,603. Junaid is one out of those many students who faced inconvenience because of the negligence.
“My exams went good. But now since they have been cancelled, I am unsure of what to do next. I spent a few thousand rupees for traveling and accommodation and it was all for naught”, says Junaid. He stays in Kolkata and had come especially for the entrance test.
Ask him if he plans to come back for the examinations and he says, “I have my WBJEE counselling in the last week of June. If I plan to give this BTech entrance again, I might have to miss out on that. Also, it is very difficult to get tickets during this season. Flight tickets would be too expensive. So I am really clueless”, he confesses.
Interestingly, in the past few weeks itself, Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia have managed to be in the news for leaked papers. While the university offers an apology for causing the inconvenience to parents and students, is it enough?