Internal exams are now being replaced by assignments and projects: Aflah, Hindu College

These are first-hand student accounts on how our young population is managing to keep their exam prep or college course work going from the confines of their homes. In case you want to share your lockdown study experience, write to us at publish@shiksha.com.

Being a student in one of the best colleges in the country and that too in the national capital is really amazing. Hindu College, University of Delhi is now more or less my second home and all those students and professors in the Department of Zoology have become nothing less than a family.

Our department is doing all the possible things to keep up with the pace of academics. When the Prime Minister announced that we are going for a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, the first thing our professors did was to create a common Email ID. Then they dropped the email and its password on our class Whatsapp group and asked us to check it on a regular basis. During the initial days of lockdown, they used this platform to stay in touch with us.

Here, they sent us study materials in PDF format, as word documents or sometimes as PowerPoint presentation. One of our professors posted the links for his online classes available on YouTube. The PDF of available reference guides were also posted.

For clearing our doubts, respective professors were available online in their class timings. Besides this common Email ID, another means introduced to tackle down this lockdown was Google classrooms.

Most of our professors created Google classroom for their respective subjects and asked us to join. Here, they make announcements regarding assignments, projects and other works that we are supposed to do. This is also the platform for students to drop their finished assignments and projects.

A couple of days before, the department also started online classes via Zoom app. The professor schedules the meeting a day before and drops the meeting ID and password along with the time of the meeting in our WhatsApp group. All we have to do is join the meeting without fail. Students can ask doubts in that online session which will be immediately solved by the teacher handling the session.

Students were supposed to give their internal exams after the reopening of the college post mid-sem break. But that never happened because of this lockdown. So those tests were replaced by assignments and projects. We got a lot of work that is to be submitted online. We were given two options, either to type in a word document or to write on sheets and then scan them and upload. The platform to do our submission was Google classrooms created by respective teachers.

Also, in order to discourage blind copying and pasting of contents from the internet, our professors said that all the labelled diagrams or other drawings should be hand-drawn.  By all these means, our professors are contacting and being in touch with us during the lockdown. At this rate, this is enough and more to complete our syllabus.

But what most of the students are missing is the process of classroom learning. Something for sure is incomplete in this virtual learning platform.

But of course, with certain upgrades and modifications, this could be made better and we are looking forward to it.

We have practical classes for our core subjects and for the generic elective subjects as well. Practical classes are really long and hectic. Besides the professors, lab staff members too needed to complete lab sessions. Since we are from the Biology stream, we have to do a lot of works in the lab like taking cross-sections, mounting, staining, and preparation of temporary and permanent slides as well. These all require chemicals and other sophisticated lab equipments. So there is no way we can perform all these ourselves.

All we can do is to complete our practical files, write all the theory part and learn the procedures and then perform the experiments in the lab after the reopening of the college. And surely we are doing this. Our professors shared the write-up part of the experiment with us and asked us to prepare our practical files accordingly. They also said that all the pending experiments will be performed after reopening of the college.

The university has recently released the notice regarding the postponement of semester exams which was supposed to commence from 6^th of May. What our professors and the college authority are asking us is to stay indoors and stay safe and to use our time wisely.

About the Author:

Aflah Shadil is from Kozhikode district in Kerala. He is currently, a first-year BSc (H) Zoology student at Hindu College, University of Delhi.