Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences denies plea to alter August 2024 exam valuation scheme

A section of MBBS students belonging to the RS 3 batch (whose admissions were done before 2019) were left disappointed when their pleas to alter the valuation pattern of the Aug 2024 exam were turned down by Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS).

The students had organized an indefinite hunger strike on the university campus in Jayanagar last Thursday. When they turned up, cops were already present on campus to make sure nothing amiss occurred. The students proceeded to meet university officials and negotiated their issues.

The Aug 2024 MBBS answer-scripts were assessed by four graders and the average was marked as the final grade. The students, however, complained that the assessments ranged drastically from grader to grader. A paper got just single-digit scores from some graders, but the same one scored well from other graders. Their average was brought down due to a low score of one among the four options and the student got failed.

The existing system has only two assessments per subject, and the highest of the two is used to compute results. The students wished the highest of two marks to be implemented on the exam they sat in August 2024.

Though the university informed them that the assessment in their subsequent exams would be based on the highest of two assessors' marks, the students demanded that their Aug 2024 exam marks be computed the same way. "It is the evaluators' fault. Why do marks fluctuate so much for one paper? We are fed up with paying exam fees over and over again. They have promised the new system for the next exam, but why should we take another one when it can be rectified here?" asked a student.

But university authorities clarified to the students that a retrospective correction is not possible. "These are repeater students. They had some grievances regarding exam fees being levied every time, which we have addressed in the best possible manner. We have addressed their demands. One demand that we could not entertain was that new guidelines should be retrospectively applied. We cannot establish a precedent like this. Any policy is future-oriented. We have assured them that from the next exams, everything will be corrected. A committee constituted to consider this deliberation in detail. It was a unanimous decision that the request cannot be entertained," said an official.

There are 1,040 students impacted by this. They will take the supplementary exams from April 7.