Despite several incentives and increase in the number of online centres, AIEEE's effort to convince students to register for the online exams received a lukewarm response. A CBSE official, from the board responsible for conducting the engineering entrance exam, told TOI that only 15% of the total registered candidates have opted for online exam.
Rama Sharma, CBSE spokesperson, said, "We have approximately 10.17 lakh students registered for the offline exam and about 1.7 lakh registered for the online mode." The total registration has been about 11.87 lakh, marginally higher than last year's 11.15 lakh.
Even out of the 1.7 lakh who chose the online mode only one lakh had completed the entire registration process before the deadline. It was for the remaining 70,000 students that the deadline was extended a couple of times.
CBSE had introduced the online exam format last year itself but received negligible response with less than one per cent of the total candidates opting for it. But with the AIEEE paper leak of 2011, the central board got further impetus to speed up the online examination process. Over 20 cities in the country, including Nagpur, were declared as online-only centres so that students could be coerced into adopting the new technological platform. The nearest offline centre from Nagpur is Amravati.
Many incentives such as exam fee discount and choice of exam date and time were offered to students opting for the online mode. So what has prevented students from rushing to these online exam centres? It turns out that even though the CBSE had planned for everything, many coaching institutes preferred to play it safe.
In Nagpur all top institutes have advised their students to go for the offline version.
Nisha Kothari, owner of a coaching institute, said, "We have told our students to go only for the offline exams for a variety of reasons. First is that the online exam will be held in May, where as the offline test will be conducted in April. Opting for the offline will help them get more time to prepare for the BITS exam later on. Secondly students are aware of the technical problems with the online CAT exam, so it is better not to stress them out and play it safe."
Academic director of another institute, Dilip Vaidya said, "We told students to go for the offline test since they hardly get time to practice for the online mode, though finally it is their choice. Despite the announcement being made a couple of months in advance, the time wasn't enough to help students increase their speed for the online mode."
Abhishek Bansal, who also manages a coaching centre, said, "I would say that less than 10% of my students have chosen the online mode. We had left the choice up to them but still they preferred the offline mode even though it is not available in Nagpur."
The offline exam is scheduled for April 29 while the online exam will be held on certain days between May 7 and 26.
No comments:
Post a Comment