Law students worried over sem 2 classes’ commencement before exams
Hyderabad: First-year law students in colleges affiliated with Osmania University are a disappointed lot because of the “unhelpful” ways of conducting their semester 1 external examination.
The students, who are yet to write their final exams for semester 1, are forced to attend classes for Semester 2 that commenced on Monday. They say that they do not have enough time to prepare for the upcoming finals as their focus is now divided between working on the current assignments and external exams due in April.
“We were given a circular on Monday, that too after several pleas, that examinations for semester 1 would begin from April 18. We are at a crossroads as we have to attend college, finish our assignments and prepare for the exams too. Some of us are not even just students, we have our full-time jobs and businesses to take care of too, though that’s my personal issue,” said a businessman pursuing law as his passion, on condition of anonymity.
A 23-year-old student said that when they were already given a schedule that had specific dates, the sudden changes affected their performance. “We won’t be able to focus on semester 2 while preparing for semester 1,” she said.
Her classmate said that the department heads at OU had an arbitrary attitude right from the start.
“Our course started in December, each subject had five units, requiring the completion of 2.5 units for one internal. We didn’t have adequate time to finish each of these for both the internals (January and February), despite that, we never complained as we understand they wanted to rush through the syllabus as they already lost a lot of time because of the pandemic, etc. Even after that, there was ample confusion between the 70-30 or 80-20 per cent weightage for internal-external marks, which people are still unsure of. While we could ignore all of that, this postponement, and no preparation holidays, is not acceptable,” the student said.
“Such indecisiveness is creating a huge problem. It is believed that there is some internal conflict among the HOD, the exam department, and faculty and this ego conflict has been leading to such ‘Tughlaq’ style of function, where students are being taken for a ride,” said another student, who is also a retired employee.
The faculty at one of the law colleges said that the exams were supposed to begin on March 27, but they received a circular saying that the last day to collect the fee for the exams is on March 27 and so have to delay the exams.
“Since the process will be followed by a week’s holiday in the first week of April, exams have been pushed to the following week,” Dr B. Padma, additional controller of examination, law and education, OU, said.
The students have now been provisionally promoted to the next semester.
Even as students made fervent pleas to the university to understand their plight and ask colleges to keep on hold the classes of 2nd semester till the exams are done, the university maintained that the decision to commence semester 2 was taken only after several student groups requested it.
“Several student organisations had, early this month, approached the vice chancellor to begin classes for semester 2 as they didn’t want to delay their academic year. They cited missing out on several opportunities and competitive exams if such a delay happens as a reason,” said Dr N. Venkateshwarlu, head of, department of law, OU
In a clear display of lack of clarity about holidays, the professor added that there will be preparatory or any other holidays in April while the additional COE said otherwise. “In fact, we, the faculty, in an attempt to complete the syllabus for students’ sake, are forgoing summer vacation and will take a break only after July,” the HOD said.
