Despite delay last year, Mumbai University to continue with OSM

Mumbai: The delay in announcing exam results last year notwithstanding, the Mumbai University (MU) has decided to continue with the on-screen marking system of online assessment.

On Wednesday, acting vice-chancellor of the MU, Dr Devanand Shinde, said that the OSM was being “refined, upgraded and customised” for better performance. Last year’s delay had been blamed on the OSM. The “upgraded” OSM will be used to assess 18 lakh answer papers of the ongoing summer examinations.

As part of the up-gradation, the varsity has created a “dashboard” that will live-stream the status of assessment and evaluation to be monitored by college principals and officials at CAP centres. The dashboard will keep an eye on the day-to-day progress made by the teachers. Explaining the new features, Dr Arjun Ghatule, director and controller of the Board of Examination and Evaluation (BoEE), said, “From the number of exam papers assessed to the subject-wise and course-wise statistics, the dashboard will store all details. All those involved in the examination and assessment procedure can access it and chart out their progress. This way, the teachers will know what remains and what is already done.”

"Initially, we used to start assessment after all the papers were done. Now, the day examination papers reach CAP centres, scanning is initiated and assessment is started,” said Dr Ghatule. They are of the view that this will speed up the process and avoid last minute hassles.

As of now, assessment of commerce and arts faculty answer papers has begun. Around 33,131 out of the 395,448 commerce papers have been assessed and evaluated, whereas nearly 2,779 out of the 26,668 arts papers have been assessed and evaluated.