NASHIK: The Nashik-headquartered Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University (YCMOU) has detected alleged malpractices by 1,857 examinees during the online semester examination for undergraduate and PG courses held in February this year. Roughly 73,000 students had appeared for the exam.
The varsity has instructed the erring examinees to reappear for the exam during the next online semester exam slated in June this year. University registrar Dinesh Bhonde and controller of examinations B P Patil told TOI that the use of sophisticated software to monitor online exams allowed the YCMOU to detect the alleged malpractices. Of the 1,857 examinees, over 960 would have to reappear for all the five papers and over 800 must write the exam for one paper.
“For the past two years, due to the pandemic, the YCMOU has been conducting online examinations. To ensure absolute transparency, we are using proctoring software using webcams to confirm the identities of the examinees and monitor their activities. The software enables us to flag off suspicious activity,” said the officials.
According to the YCMOU officials, the malpractices ranged from the use of dummy candidates to write the exams, examinees seeking help from others while writing the paper online, and moving away from the laptop/desktop/mobile for prolonged periods during the exam hours etc. Citing an example, the officials said that one examinee had put his photograph in front of the webcam to hoodwink the university. But the software recorded that malpractice. “The malpractices captured by the software were scrutinised manually by the examination department and the erring examinees were summoned to the varsity’s regional centres seeking explanations,” said Patil.
