Director meets students to discuss problems in a spam marred meeting

In response to growing concerns amongst freshers’ regarding the online semester, the administration held a scheduled interaction with the Director on the 30th of January in a bid to alleviate concerns. Following the Director’s interaction, the course coordinators briefed the freshers about how their courses would be revamped to suit the online mode and addressed issues concerning their courses.

While clarity was provided on most issues (minutes of the meeting have been attached at the end of this piece), the administration quite surprisingly decided to tweak the evaluation process halfway through the semester and replaced the continuous evaluation system (that is currently in place) with a confusing mixture of the existing system and a new one. The new system will grade students based on pseudo mid and end semester tests slotted to be held over a three day period in February and March.

With the Director not delving into specifics about the respective weightage of the systems or how grades of tests that have already been taken will contribute towards grading, students were unfortunately left more confused than before (to clarify, these changes apply only to first-year undergraduate students and won’t affect the rest). Moreover, the logistics of having two thousand students in an online platform led to chaos, as any sort of verbal Q&A turned out to be impossible. The meeting was also marred by unruly behaviour as spam accounts posted a flurry of messages and derogatory content in the chat.

The meeting concluded with the following decisions concerning the freshers’ semester:

1) Tentative date for resumption of offline classes — 10/08/2021

2) Classes will not be conducted on Sundays.

3) Nothing except EAA will be conducted on Saturdays.

4) Classes will be conducted only according to the timetable — there will be no extra classes.

5) The syllabus for tests will be announced well in advance.

6) Test window for all subjects’ tests: 9th — 12th February and 9th — 12th March

7) Break for exams: 6th — 8th February and 6th — 8th March

8) No classes will be conducted during the test window.

9) 12th March: Date for end of Autumn Semester

10) 22nd March: Date for commencement of Spring Semester

11) 19th March: Subject Registration for Spring Semester

12) 18th June: Date for end of Spring Semester