Mehul Jani ,Yogesh Avasthi
Posted On Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 02:14:17 AM
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The doctors’ circle in the state are taken aback as Gujarat University has withheld the results of 25 medical students who adopted unethical means while writing their examination in January. A majority of these students are ward of doctors and had left unique marks in their answer books that would make it easy for the examiner to identify them.
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Vice Chancellor Parimal Trivedi constituted a three-member committee — Gujarat Cancer Society Medical College Dean
Kirti Patel, BJ Medical College Dean Bharat Shah and GU Medical Dean Kalpesh Shah — to look into the issue |
While leaving marks is nothing new — the issue has been raised on quite a few occasions, including the important forum of Senate, but the examination did not take any step to curb the menace — this is the first time that the university has acted on the complaint.
Sources say that students have been leaving identification marks in their answer books, violating the rules which prohibits them from writing anything other than answers to questions. These marks help them identify their scripts when they go to evaluators. The latter are put under pressure to dole out undue favours to the students.
The university incidentally never acted on these complaints. However, this time around Vice Chancellor Parimal Trivedi constituted a three-member committee — Gujarat Cancer Society Medical College Dean Kirti Patel, BJ Medical College Dean Bharat Shah and GU Medical Dean Kalpesh Shah — to look into the issue.
While the 25 students who have left unique identification marks in their answer books are liable to be punished under rules governing cases of copying, the committee decided to change the examiners assigned.
These answer books were to be evaluated by assistant professors level faculty, but the committee decided to send these scripts to professors. However, the committee passed a resolution that rules against copying would be invoked against future offenders.
Dr Trivedi had earlier admitted there are some doctors and parents who try to help out their children and wards in their medical examinations and that it is a challenge for the varsity to ensure “free and fair” examinations for medical and dental courses (AM, GU rap for docs helping wards in exams, Jan 3).
As many as 1,500 students had appeared for the MBBS, dental and super specialisation examinations in January.
Malpractices have been reported in the practical examinations in the past, which the vice chancellor said were being closely monitored. There have been allegations of some examiners favouring a select few by posing easy questions in the viva voce.
There have been allegations that an active syndicate member of Gujarat University ran an ‘organised’ racket to ‘help’ children of some prominent doctors appearing for the medical examinations.
The member is also alleged to have ensured that only selected examiners were given duty to conduct the viva voce. An oral complaint was even reportedly made to the then education minister.
A case had even reached the high court. In May last year, Gujarat High Court had ruled in favour of Manoj Bansal who had topped the super speciality course of DM cardiology in 2009 but was denied the gold medal by Gujarat University, that refused to award him the medal because he had passed in second attempt.
A division bench concluded that “number of attempts was not a constraint at all” in awarding the medal. The bench sent the issue back to the vice chancellor and registrar for reconsideration.
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