3 years of delay! DU professors blame NTA CUET for delays in academic session

NEW DELHI: Delhi University professors expressed concern about the disruption in the academic session for the last three years and condemned the decision to postpone the semester exams. Citing delay in CUET results, poor infrastructure, and heatwave which affected the performance of students, DU teachers pointed out how the teaching quality gets affected due to workload.

DU elected member of academic council Monami Sinha said: “Most colleges of DU don't even have fully functioning fans, forget about coolers or air conditioning. The postponement leads to exams being held during the hottest time of the year, end may and June. This year when temperatures soared and went well over 50 degrees, almost every day of the examination, our college had students fainting during the exam due to extreme heat.”

Several students were rushed to the nearby hospitals with their blood pressure falling to “dangerously low levels” and many others could not even appear for exams.

“Due to space crunch, 60-70 students are stuffed in a classroom during big exams, causing suffocation and discomfort. How is the student supposed to perform well, to the best of her ability, under such circumstances? Is the university willing to take responsibility for this huge health crisis that is ensuing due to postponement of semester exams,” she said in a statement.

The university postponed the LLB semester exams, scheduled to be held on July 4, till further notice.

Also read CUET UG: Admission delays, vacant seats, loss to local students have universities seeking alternatives

Teaching quality in DU

Monami Sinha, associate professor at Kamala Nehru College, pointed out that the quality of teaching has also been affected due to the staggered academic calendar. The DU college teachers were required to take classes, invigilate and evaluate answer sheets at the same time.

“The staggered calendar virtually requires us to be at three places, physically, at the same time. Quality of teaching is taking a hit, campus life is taking a hit, schedules have become a mess and college activity like conducting seminars and festivals has become very very difficult. Moreover, the vacation time which is crucial for teachers to evaluate scripts, do their own research work or attend faculty development programmes has been taken away,” the professor said.

“We demand that the University look into these serious issues and reclaim its calendar instead of leaving it to the uncertainties of an inefficient agency like NTA, which even after three years has been unable to clean up its act,” she added.

Also read ‘Big loss to colleges’: Over 5,000 seats vacant after 4 rounds of DU UG seat allocation

3 year delay

Rudrashish Chakraborty, associate professor at Kirori Mal College, claimed that the DU has not yet notified the academic calendar for semester 1 and 2, ie. for the first-year undergraduate students, owing to the ongoing NTA fiasco.

“This is the third year in succession that the UG admission process has been delayed in DU owing to the CUET. In 2022-23, when CUET was first introduced in DU for UG admission, the classes for semester 1 began in November: because the Ministry of Education could not get its act together in conducting CUET on time. Last year in 2023-24, despite CUET being conducted early, the academic calendar began on August 16, 2023: three weeks after the scheduled time owing to delay in the declaration of results,” Chakraborty said.

And this year, there is no sight of admission happening in the near future since the very process of CUET is under scanner, thanks to the NTA.

Terming the delay as a man-made crisis, he said: “DU has barely recovered from three years of staggered academic calendar beginning with the COVID period when the current crisis has been thrust upon the teachers, students and parents. Unlike the pandemic period which was beyond human control, the current crisis is clearly man-made: a consequence of utter apathy and incompetence of the Ministry of Education and its minion, the NTA,” he said.

“It is amply clear that since DU decided to join the CUET bandwagon for its admission process, it has not surrendered its autonomy in the admission policy but it has seriously compromised its academic calendar at the cost of students, teachers and parents,” he added.