Exams are important but risking the lives of students and parents for exams is not a Right Thing. More than 75,000 Covid-19 positive cases were reported in the past 24 hours in the country. Must say that the virus is winning over on the statistics. If these are only the reported cases then how many cases are not being reported and had direct deaths.
Amidst this situation, the Government of India came up with the decision of the conduction of the Competitive exams like NEET, JEE, NATA,ICET etc.
Do you think that conducting these exams would have a positive or negative effect on the students as well as the UGC for following the guidelines? And how about the upcoming academic year of 2021?
We all know that these exams have been postponed for quite a few months and what if this continues.
The main issue for students or the government avoiding in conduction of the exams is this will lead to huge gatherings at the exam centers. We all know that almost 25 lakh students give these exams every year and there are only a few exam centers in the cities.
Secondly, the students need to travel and considering the current situation the local transport facilities are not available as before which will lead to difficulty in traveling and not every student is in a state of affording a private transport for themselves.
Adding up to this the students do not travel alone sometimes and bring their parents alongside, resulting in an extra crowd.
Now both the parents and the students are at risk. Okay, let’s say that all of this is managed then what about the safety protocols being followed at the centers.
The student might be healthy when reached to the exam center and can get affected in this process than what about the after situation. This is not about one student, it’s about lakhs of students.
So what about not conducting the exams. No, that cannot be the solution but that also doesn’t mean they should be conducted regularly as in previous years.
By taking into consideration the Effective Reproductive Rate one must voice out their opinion instead of creating silly hashtags and following online trends.
This rate is a way of rating the ability of the disease to spread from one infected person basically how much ability one infected person has to pass the virus to the other.
So according to this rate if the number is below 1 then we can say that the situation is in control and can be handled further on.
On 28th August finally, after a long wait for the students, the Supreme court announced that the state governments cannot promote its final year students before conducting the final year exams.
The court also said that though conducting the exams is mandatory, it is not compulsory to hold them before September 30th.
We also witnessed that the education minister stated that the number of admit cards being downloaded by the students ready to give JEE and NEET is an indicator by the majority of the students for wanting the exams to be conducted.
Now, what if the exams are not conducted? What about the upcoming academic year?
The first thing the academic year is going to be disturbed which has to be started by now for the students aiming for higher studies. The students are placed in various companies as freshers, the jobs are on hold because their graduation is on hold too.
The mental stress faced by many students is going to increase day by day. Even if the exams are conducted the after processes are also very important.
According to us conducting the exams or postponing them cannot be the ultimate solution but there can be other sources for conducting them and also most importantly following the safety norms cause we don’t want the virus to get into our system.
Do let us know your thoughts on this issue.