Madras University to form panel to inquire arrears exam row

Online exams may have given room for malpractice: V-C

The Syndicate of the University of Madras has decided to constitute a committee to inquire into how over 100 candidates not registered with the institution wrote the online semester exams.

Director of the Institute of Distance Education K. Ravichandran had flagged the issue to the university authorities.

According to him, the candidates, who were not enrolled with the IDE, had taken the semester exams held online last year. It was only when the university prepared the results that the malpractice was noticed.

“These candidates are believed to have come through study centres,” said Vice-Chancellor S. Gowri.

“We do not have all the details. It has been proposed to set up an internal committee that will include the Dean of Legal Studies. We have not even started preliminary inquiry. Normally, such committees have three to five persons, including Syndicate members and senior professors,” he told reporters at the end of the Syndicate meeting on Thursday.

Although the institution would be closed for the next week, the officials would work towards constituting the inquiry panel, Professor Gowri said. According to him, holding the exams online last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic gave scope for the malpractice. “With the regular system of offline exams back in force such malpractices cannot occur,” he said.

“We do not know how they came in. So far, we have found 116 such candidates. We have to conduct a full inquiry to find out how many such candidates managed to take the exams. The results of the candidates who had indulged in malpractice have been withheld,” Professor Gowri added.

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