Students In Punjab Wait For Results Since 6 Months

Usually overshooting deadlines, declaring results on time has become an arduous task for Punjab University's (PU) examination branch. This time, the department has taken over 6 months to collect answer sheets of a course in psychology from its evaluators in far flung areas.

Students, who enrolled for a one-year post graduate diploma in counselling and psychotherapy, still await their results for exams held in October 2011. Ruing that the university is charging them Rs.40,000/- for the year-long professional course, students claim that while the fee is pinching their pockets, their career is also put at stake because of the delay. One of the student said “Those who wrote the semester exams in December, two months after me, have already got their results. My batch cannot apply for job, particularly overseas, since our results are stuck. We took admission in August 2010”.

On Admitting to the excessive delay in declaring the results for this course, officials of the examination branch justified that evaluators living in far flung areas are the root of the problem. The Controller of Examination A.K.Bhandari says “We are helpless since the evaluators are living in areas that are so far away that one cannot even personally go and collect the answer sheets, like we do in other cases”. He added that the examination branch only picks evaluators from a list sent by the concerned department's board of studies.

However, the Chairperson of the psychology department Seema Vinayak said “Conducting exams and declaring results are the responsibility of the exam branch. The onus falls on the examination branch for declaring the results as well”.